NOTES

1. INTRODUCTION

1. The history of small towns and the mythology that grew up around them is amply described in a relatively neglected survey, Richard Lingeman, Small Town America: A Narrative History, 1620–the Present (New York: Putnam, 1980). Lingeman’s book is no longer in print, and because of its scope necessarily paints with a broad brush, but it is replete with interesting details and anecdotes, and provides some useful information about small towns through the early 1970s.

2. Opinion polls offer varying impressions of Americans’ attitudes toward small towns. Generally speaking, polls suggest that many Americans would like to live in a small town or rural area, and show that a majority of those who do live in small towns are satisfied with their communities. For example, a poll conducted by the Pew Research Center in 2008 found that 30 percent of those who responded would prefer to live in a small town if they could live anywhere, another 21 percent preferred a rural area, whereas 23 percent preferred a city, and 25 percent preferred a suburban area; of those who said they currently lived in a small town, 55 percent described their community as excellent or very good. The proportion of people who described their communities as excellent or very good was higher, though, among respondents in suburbs (68 percent) and rural areas (71 percent), and only slightly lower (52 percent) in cities (Paul Taylor, Rich Morin, Kim Parker, D’Vera Cohn, and Wendy Wang, “For Nearly Half of America, Grass Is Greener Somewhere Else,” Pew Research Center Social and Demographic Trends Report, January 29, 2009, http://www.pewsocialtrends.org). Yet the Pew results are of limited use because the response rate to the survey was only 22 percent for those sampled through landline phone numbers and 20 percent for those sampled through cell phone numbers. Further complicating the difficulties, of the respondents who said they lived in a small town, 33 percent lived in counties that the researchers coded as having high-density populations, and 62 percent were coded as actually living in an urban or suburban area. Earlier surveys generally reported favorable attitudes toward small towns as well. For example, a 1985 Roper Poll found that 61 percent of those surveyed thought a small town was best for “the kind of friends you’d have,” compared with only 12 percent who thought a big city would be best (26 percent volunteered “no difference”). Small towns received equally large or larger preferences as places for leading a healthy life, privacy, and raising children (Roper Organization, November 2, 1985, based on a sample of 1,998 personal interviews, http://www.ropercenter.uconn.edu/data_access/ipoll). Nevertheless, a story two years later (William Mueller, “Do Americans Really Want to Live in Small Towns?” American Demographics [January 1987]: 60) that drew on other evidence argued that schools and health services in small towns were inferior, gossip and interpersonal conflicts were common, and it was not exactly healthy to live “downwind of farmer Bob as he gives the crops a blast of some chemical carcinogen.” A decade earlier, as census data demonstrated that the population living in small towns and rural areas was declining, or at best stable, a poll conducted on August 19, 1977, by the ICR Survey Research Group for Hearst Newspapers reported that 21 percent of Americans claimed to have moved from the suburbs to a country or rural setting, while only 12 percent had moved from a country or rural setting to the suburbs (http://www.ropercenter.uconn.edu/ipoll). Polls results are difficult to interpret because, as I mentioned in the preface, many Americans who live in large metropolitan areas imagine themselves to be living in small towns. In a 2006 poll conducted by the Pew Research Center, for instance, 26 percent of those who responded said they lived in a small town, 16 percent said they lived in a rural area, and 57 percent said they lived in a city or suburb (51 percent said they would prefer a small town or rural area if they could live anywhere; Richard Morin and Paul Taylor, “Suburbs Not Most Popular, But Suburbanites Most Content,” Pew Research Center Publications, February 26, 2009, http://www.pewresearch.org). If those responses were taken at face value, 78 million Americans lived in small towns, whereas the US Census showed that only 52 million lived in incorporated places of under 25,000 (including incorporated places of that size that were in metropolitan areas), and indicated that 222 million Americans lived in urban areas, whereas the poll responses suggested only 174 million (US Census Bureau, Statistical Abstract of the United States: 2008 [Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 2008], tables 28 and 29).

3. H. Paul Douglass, The Little Town: Especially in Its Rural Relationships (New York: Macmillan, 1919), 3.

4. Ibid., 242.

5. On social capital, see especially James Coleman, “Social Capital in the Creation of Human Capital,” American Journal of Sociology 94 (1988): S95–120. For one of the most extensive empirical examinations of the changing role of social capital in community life, see Robert D. Putnam, Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2000). Helpful attention is also being given to the role of spatial arrangements in relation to social capital. See, for example, Kevin S. Hanna, Ann Dale, and Chris Ling, “Social Capital and Quality of Place: Reflections on Growth and Change in a Small Town,” Local Environment 14 (2009): 31–44, which emphasizes not only the ways in which space influences social networks but also the attachment to places and spatial arrangements that is important to residents’ sense of community. See also the more general argument in Ann R. Tickamyer, “Space Matters! Spatial Inequality in Future Sociology,” Contemporary Sociology 29 (2000): 805–13. This is a theme that also appears repeatedly in my interviews, as discussed especially in chapters 3 and 4. Readers interested in network approaches to community should consult M.E.J. Newman, “Detecting Community Structure in Networks,” European Physical Journal B 38 (2004): 321–30; Filippo Radicchi, Claudio Castellano, Federico Cecconi, Vittorio Loreto, and Domenico Parisi, “Defining and Identifying Communities in Networks,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 101 (2004): 2658–63; in which community is defined as a subset of connections in a network that are denser than in other parts of the network. For a readable introduction, see also Albert-Laszlo Barabasi, Linked: How Everything Is Connected to Everything Else, and What It Means for Business, Science, and Everyday Life (New York: Penguin, 2003). Defining community strictly in terms of network connections offers attractive opportunities for quantification, but leaves aside important questions about the meanings of community to those involved, the quality of their relationships, and properties of the collectivity that cannot be reduced to relationships between individuals.

6. As background for my research, I benefited greatly from reading memoirs composed by writers who grew up in small towns. See, for example, M. J. Anderson, Portable Prairie: Confessions of an Unsettled Midwesterner (New York: Thomas Dunne, 2004); Leslie O. Anderson, Memoirs of a Country Boy/Newspaper Man (Elk River, MN: DeForest Press, 2004); Bob Barnett, Growing Up in the Last Small Town (Ashland, KY: Jesse Stuart Foundation, 2010); Carol Bodensteiner, Growing Up Country: Memories of an Iowa Farm Girl (Des Moines, IA: Sun Rising Press, 2008); Eric B. Fowler and Sheila Delaney, Small-Town Boy, Small-Town Girl: Growing Up in South Dakota, 1920–1950 (Pierre: South Dakota Historical Society, 2009); Mary Karr, The Liar’s Club: A Memoir (New York: Penguin, 2005); Dorothy Hubbard Schwieder, Growing Up with the Town: Family and Community on the Great Plains (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2002); Karen Valby, Welcome to Utopia: Notes from a Small Town (New York: Spiegel and Grau, 2010). Insightful as such volumes are, their value as interpretations of small town life are limited because of focusing on a single community, emphasizing what that community is remembered to have been like during the writer’s childhood, and in most instances being written by someone who went on to become a journalist, writer, or educator. As artistic works, the most engaging memoirs tend to exoticize small-town life as well, with characters named Bubba and Clem who make moonshine, and one-eyed grandmothers who shoot holes in the kitchen wall and fend off plagues of fence-post-devouring insects.

7. I discuss population decline and other changes in chapters 3 and 6. The perception that small towns are declining is rooted in the fact that the population of many of the smallest towns is indeed declining. Relative to the growth of large cities and suburbs, small towns are also a relatively smaller proportion of the US population. This sense of decline should not be exaggerated, however. For example, in their book Century of Difference: How America Changed in the Last One Hundred Years (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 2006), 173, Claude S. Fischer and Michael Hout include a chart based on census data from 1900 to 2000 showing a large decline in the proportion of Americans who lived in the “countryside” (presumably on farms and in unincorporated or small villages), but relatively little proportional decline in the population living in “towns” (incorporated places of at least twenty-five hundred people not in a metropolitan area).

8. I have in mind studies such as the following: Nancy Tatom Ammerman, Bible Believers: Fundamentalists in the Modern World (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1987); Lynn Davidman, Tradition in a Rootless World: Women Turn to Orthodox Judaism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991).

9. I discuss politics and attitudes toward social and moral issues in chapters 8 and 9. An interesting example of homespun wisdom gleaned from colorful small town residents is Denis Boyles, Superior, Nebraska: The Common Sense Values of America’s Heartland (New York: Doubleday, 2008). See also Bill Bryson, The Lost Continent: Travels in Small-Town America (New York: Harper Perennial, 1990).

10. As the source of sociologists’ interest in the distinction between the terms gemeinschaft and gesellschaft is especially important in this regard, see Ferdinand Tönnies, Community and Civil Society, ed. Jose Harris (1887; repr., Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001). In his The Division of Labor in Society (1893; repr., New York: Macmillan, 1933), Durkheim presents an argument about mechanical and organic solidarity that should not be taken directly as an assertion about the declining sociological significance of small towns. Some interpretations of Durkheim draw this conclusion, however, especially in suggesting that community in modern society ceases to be based on locality and instead is based on nonspatially grounded social relationships (see, for example, Joseph R. Gusfield, The Community: A Critical Response [New York: Harper Colophon, 1975]; David W. McMillan and David M. Chavis, “Sense of Community: A Definition and Theory,” Journal of Community Psychology 14 [1986]: 6–23). While it is certainly true that ease of travel and electronic communication make possible social relationships that are less spatially bound, the suggestion that locality ceases to be important to understandings of community is clearly false. In a national survey (Robert Wuthnow, Loose Connections: Joining Together in America’s Fragmented Communities [Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998]), 42 percent said their neighborhood comes closest to their definition of community, 35 percent said the town in which they lived comes closest, 8 percent said the larger region in which they lived was the best approximation, only 12 percent said the people they associate with felt closest to their definition, and 3 percent gave other responses. The significance of proximity on a smaller scale is also evident in Suzanne Keller, Community: Pursuing the Dream, Living the Reality (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003). In a different context, see also Clive C. Taylor and Alan R. Townsend, “The Local ‘Sense of Place’ as Evidenced in North-East England,” Urban Studies 13 (1976): 133–46.

11. A valuable survey of the literature can be found in Thomas Bender, Community and Social Change in America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978). In retrospect, an important contribution that shaped subsequent thinking about community in suburbs was Herbert J. Gans, The Levittowners: Ways of Life and Politics in a New Suburban Community (New York: Pantheon Books, 1967). In the context of popular Cold War concerns about the atomization (an interesting metaphor) of social relationships in so-called mass society (for example, as described in David Riesman, The Lonely Crowd: A Study of Changing American Character [New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1950]; further examined in William Kornhauser, The Politics of Mass Society [Glencoe, IL: Free Press, 1959]), The Levittowners produced encouraging evidence that newcomers in large suburban housing developments were successfully meeting their neighbors as well as mingling over coffee and backyard barbeques. For a crucial statistical study that could be interpreted as suggesting that small towns were not distinct from larger metropolitan areas, see John D. Kasarda and Morris Janowitz, “Community Attachment in Mass Society,” American Sociological Review 39 (1974): 328–39. With national survey data, this article examined whether several measures of community attachment were influenced more by size of place (and population density) or duration of residence. The authors concluded that size of place mattered little compared to the effects of duration of residence. Several aspects of the study, though, limits its usefulness as evidence about the distinctiveness or lack of distinctive characteristics of community in small towns: the study was based on data from Great Britain rather than the United States, the rural–urban variable did not distinguish respondents in small towns from those living on farms or in the open country, or those living in small towns that were distant from or in closer proximity to metropolitan areas, and the conceptual argument did not take account of the fact that duration of residence is greater in smaller communities than in larger ones. Still, the results did show that respondents who expressed greater interest in their place of residence (an attitudinal measure of community attachment) were also more likely to spend time with friends and relatives in the area as well as participate in community organizations.

12. For a notable exception, which includes information about small towns in comparison with urban residents, see Claude S. Fischer, To Dwell among Friends: Personal Networks in Town and City (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982). For a more general examination of survey data about friendship and contacts with family, see Claude S. Fischer, Still Connected: Family and Friends in America since 1970 (New York: Russell Sage Foundation Press, 2011). Ethnographic studies of small towns that are helpful in providing a grassroots sense of community dynamics include Sonya Salamon, Newcomers to Old Towns: Suburbanization of the Heartland (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003); Richard O. Davies, Main Street Blues: The Decline of Small-Town America (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1998); Osha Gray Davidson, Broken Heartland: The Rise of America’s Rural Ghetto (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1996).

13. For an insightful source of myth and imagery, see Emanuel Levy, Small-Town America in Film: The Decline and Fall of Community (New York: Continuum, 1991). This work identifies nearly a thousand twentieth-century films that dealt with small towns and examines approximately eighty of these in detail. For a more limited regional focus, but with insightful historical, literary, and ethnographic essays, see Richard O. Davies, Joseph A. Amato, and David R. Pichaske, eds., A Place Called Home: Writings on the Midwestern Small Town (Saint Paul: Minnesota Historical Society, 2003).

14. For additional information about the interviews, see the methodology appendix.

15. The US Census Bureau (2010 Decennial Census, released April 1, 2011, http://www.census.gov) estimates the number of incorporated places (exclusive of census-defined places) in 2010 as 19,505, of which 18,088 had populations under 25,000. The 2010 population in all incorporated places was estimated at 189 million, of which 52.9 million were in places with populations under 25,000. The number of incorporated places with populations under 25,000 was reported as 17,412 in 1960, 17,826 in 1970, 18,152 in 1980, 18,191 in 1990, and 18,221 in 2000; the total population in these places was estimated at 40 million in 1960, 44 million in 1970, 47.8 million in 1980, 48.5 million in 1990, and 52 million in 2000. Electronic data files for incorporated places in 2000 were obtained from the Missouri Census Data Center, supplemented with 2010 population figures from congressional redistricting data (the most recent available at the time of the analysis), and used to sort out towns in urbanized places, leaving 14,548 non-urbanized towns with populations under 25,000 with a total population of 29 million. See US Census Bureau, Historical Statistics of the United States: Colonial Times to 1970 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1975), series A73–90. For definitions of urban-fringe places, see US Census Bureau, Statistical Abstract of the United States: 1982 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1982), 21. Examples of towns excluded because of being identified as urban-fringe communities are Atherton, California, in the vicinity of San Francisco and San Jose; Chickasaw, Alabama, six miles from Mobile; Elsmere, Delaware, four miles west of Wilmington; Hiawatha, Iowa, seven miles north of Cedar Rapids; Hillside, Illinois, fifteen miles from downtown Chicago; Mission, Kansas, seven miles from Kansas City; Highland Park, Texas, three miles from Dallas; and Rothschild, Wisconsin, six miles from Wausau. Census Bureau data for incorporated places underestimate the number and population of small towns in New England (Maine, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, and Vermont), where township definitions apply. Rural residents served by small towns are not included in population estimates for incorporated places.

16. On the history of New England minor civil divisions, see J. A. Fairlee, Local Government in Counties, Towns, and Villages (New York: Century, 1906); James S. Garland, New England Town Law: A Digest of Statutes and Decisions concerning Towns and Town Officers (Boston: Boston Book Company, 1906).

17. The information for minor civil divisions is taken from the 2000 and 2010 decennial censuses, drawing principally from county subdivision data compiled by the Missouri Center for Census Data and http://www.socialexplorer.com. The 2010 redistricting files were used to identify minor civil divisions with fewer than 25,000 residents and then merged with the 2010 data to select towns with no population in urbanized areas.

18. The data shown in figure 1.1 combine information from the 2010 decennial census for incorporated places and minor civil divisions (in New England and New York) that had populations under 25,000 and were not located in an urban-fringe area. Analysis of the electronic data files identified a total of 9,054 towns in nonurban areas with populations under 1,000 in 2010, 2,841 towns with populations of 1,000 to 1,999, 2,618 towns with populations of 2,000 to 4,999, 1,131 towns with populations of 5,000 to 9,999, and 663 towns with populations of 10,000 to 24,999. The mean population of these towns, respectively, was 396, 1,428, 3,131, 6,989, and 15,028.

19. The electronic data files for the 2010 census population of incorporated places and minor civil divisions in nonurban areas showed 3.59 million people living in towns with populations under 1,000, 4.06 million in towns of 1,000 to 1,999, 8.2 million in towns of 2,000 to 4,999, 7.9 million in towns of 5,000 to 9,999, and 9.96 million in towns of 10,000 to 24,999. In addition to the 33.7 million people who reside in these incorporated places and minor civil divisions with fewer than 25,000 people, as many as another 30 million people who live in the vicinity of these towns may depend on them as the closest venues for schools, routine supplies, and local government services (US Census Bureau, Statistical Abstract of the United States: 2010 [Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 2010], table 29, in which 59 million people as of 2000 were classified as living in rural areas).

20. A reason for incorporating 25,000 as a threshold is that published census data have generally employed this number as a cutoff point in tabular summaries. The most relevant survey data permits identifying respondents in nonmetropolitan communities of 20,000 and under. The historical distinction used by the Census Bureau to identify places of under 2,500 as “rural” has been employed in some studies, but its value for community studies has been limited; see, for example, Irwin T. Sanders and Gordon F. Lewis, “Rural Community Studies in the United States: A Decade in Review,” Annual Review of Sociology 2 (1976): 35–53. See also Robert R. Dykstra, “Town–Country Conflict: A Hidden Dimension in American Social History,” Agricultural History 38 (1964): 195–204. This article argues for the importance of distinguishing town from nontown residents in rural areas. In our qualitative interviews, we asked some interviewees directly how large a town could be and still be considered small. Nearly all those interviewees agreed that a town of 20,000 to 25,000 was still small enough to be considered a small town. We also examined when other interviewees volunteered comments about suitable definitions of small town. Several interviewees placed the appropriate size as high as 40,000 to 50,000. For a useful discussion of considerations involved in place-level census data, see Charles M. Tolbert, Michael D. Irwin, Thomas A. Lyson, and Alfred R. Nucci, “Civic Community in Small-Town America: How Civic Welfare Is Influenced by Local Capitalism and Civic Engagement,” Rural Sociology 67 (2002): 90–113. Because of different data constraints, these authors excluded towns with fewer than 2,500 residents, but included those with up to 20,000 residents, and distinguished between towns in metropolitan and nonmetropolitan areas. They contend that small towns should be where civic engagement is especially notable and suggest that large data units, such as counties, “may mask essential differences in local communities’ institutional structures” (ibid., 92).

21. The average distances mentioned here are computed as the square root of the mean number of square miles of land per county in each state divided by the mean number of incorporated towns with populations of less than 25,000 per county in each state; US Census Bureau, County Data, electronic data file for the 2000 census, supplemented with data for the number of towns with a population in 2010 of under 25,000 in each county.

22. Because of the relatively large number of qualitative interviews, it is important not to confuse these data with the kinds of information typically drawn from surveys. The qualitative interviews are not culled from a “sample” and are not meant to represent a predefined population. For those purposes, I have included data from representative sample surveys. The purpose of qualitative interviews is to examine in greater detail than can be done in surveys the discourse through which ordinary people describe their lives and communities, the cognitive schemata and narratives they use to make sense of their experiences as well as convey the meanings of them, and the variations in these meanings and accounts. For recent thinking in the social sciences about qualitative interviews used in conjunction with surveys, see especially Mario Luis Small, “ ‘How Many Cases Do I Need?’ On Science and the Logic of Case Selection in Field-Based Research,” Ethnography 10 (2009): 5–38. For other works of particular value, see also Kathy Charmaz, Constructing Grounded Theory: A Practical Guide through Qualitative Analysis (London: Sage, 2006); Juliet Corbin and Anselm C. Strauss, Basics of Qualitative Research: Techniques and Procedures for Developing Grounded Theory (London: Sage, 2007); Steiner Kvale and Svend Brinkmann, InterViews: Learning the Craft of Qualitative Research (London: Sage, 2009); Irving Seidman, Interviewing as Qualitative Research: A Guide for Researchers in Education and the Social Sciences (New York: Teachers College Press, 2006).

23. These aspects of community life amply demonstrate the importance of the “local context in constituting social worlds,” as has been argued in Gary Alan Fine, “The Sociology of the Local: Action and Its Publics,” Sociological Theory 28 (2010): 355–76.

24. Clifford Geertz, Local Knowledge: Further Essays in Interpretive Anthropology (New York: Basic Books, 1982), 92.

25. Having invoked Geertz, it may be appropriate to note here that my approach emphasizes interpretation through a close reading of the discourse, symbols, and rituals of community life in small towns much in the way suggested in Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays (New York: Basic Books, 1973). The observation I mention here about not taking community in small towns for granted, but needing to interrogate how it happens and what it means, is similar to the view expressed in Lyn C. MacGregor, Habits of the Heartland: Small-Town Life in Modern America (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2010). MacGregor concludes her engaging ethnographic study of Viroqua, Wisconsin, by asserting the utility of “remaining agnostic about what community is and focusing instead on understanding how community is made” (ibid., 236).

26. For a compelling account of how a distinctly “American” character developed and spread, see Claude S. Fischer, Made in America: A Social History of American Culture and Character (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010). On the effects of food processing and franchise marketing, see George R. Ritzer, The McDonaldization of Society, 6th ed. (Newbury Park, CA: Pine Forge Press, 2010). Among empirical studies of the effects of television, see James R. Beniger, “Does Television Enhance the Shared Symbolic Environment? Trends in Labeling of Editorial Cartoons, 1948–1980,” American Sociological Review 48 (1983): 103–11; Karen A. Cerulo, “Television, Magazine Covers, and the Shared Symbolic Environment: 1948–1970,” American Sociological Review 49 (1984): 566–70. For advertising, see especially Jackson Lears, Fables of Abundance: A Cultural History of Advertising in America (New York: Basic Books, 1995).

27. The point about looking for symbols, rituals, and meanings that undergird a particularly deep, emotion-laden, or valued aspect of a society, and that becomes closely attached to persons’ identities, follows suggestions in Ann Swidler, “Geertz’s Ambiguous Legacy,” Contemporary Sociology 25 (1996): 299–302; Ann Swidler, Talk of Love: How Culture Matters (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001), 220–23; Ann Swidler, “Comment on Stephen Vaisey’s ‘Socrates, Skinner, and Aristotle: Three Ways of Thinking about Culture in Action,’ ” Sociological Forum 23 (2008): 614–18.

2. YOU HAVE TO DEAL WITH EVERYBODY: THE INHABITANTS OF SMALL TOWNS

1. Glenn V. Fuguitt, David L. Brown, and Calvin L. Beale, Rural and Small Town America (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1989), 411. I also draw here on US census data from 1970 and 1980.

2. US Census Bureau, 2010, residents of incorporated places and New England towns; household income data drawn from the merged 2005 to 2009 American Community Surveys, http://www.socialexplorer.com.

3. The data in figure 2.1 are from the 2005 to 2009 American Community Surveys, conducted by the US Census Bureau. For the diversity index, see Peter Michael Blau, Inequality and Heterogeneity: A Primitive Theory of Social Structure (New York: Free Press, 1977); Thomas Rotolo, “Town Heterogeneity and Affiliation: A Multilevel Analysis of Voluntary Association Membership,” Sociological Perspectives 43 (2000): 272–89. This index is adjusted for the number of categories, and is calculated as k / k−1 (1 − Σ pi²), where k is the number of categories and p is the proportion of households in each town that fall into the ith census-defined income category, which were: less than $10,000, $10,000 to $14,999, $15,000 to $19,999, $20,000 to $24,999, $25,000 to $29,999, $30,000 to $34,999, $35,000 to $39,999, $40,000 to $44,999, $45,000 to $49,999, $50,000 to $59,999, $60,000 to $74,999, $75,000 to $99,999, $100,000 to $124,999, $125,000 to $149,999, $150,000 to $199,999, and $200,000 or more.

4. James West, Plainville, U.S.A. (New York: Columbia University, 1945), 115 (emphasis and colloquial misspelling of “ever’body” in the original); Arthur J. Vidich and Joseph Bensman, Small Town in Mass Society: Class, Power, and Religion in a Rural Community (New York: Doubleday, 1958), 40–41; W. Lloyd Warner, Yankee City (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1963). Reflecting on ethnographic studies of this era, anthropologist Sherry Ortner observes the stress on social class in sociological studies compared to its relative absence in the work of anthropologists in the 1960s and 1970s; Sherry Ortner, Anthropology and Social Theory: Culture, Power, and the Acting Subject (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006), especially 20–21.

5. See also David M. Hummon, Commonplaces: Community Ideology and Identity in American Culture (New York: State University of New York Press, 1990), which treats townspeople’s emphasis on being equal as an example of villagers’ ideology.

6. Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste, trans. Richard Nice (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984). For the United States, Bourdieu’s insights have been significantly extended beyond observations about taste to include a more general concept of symbolic boundaries that may consist of moral sentiments and values as well. See especially Michele Lamont, Money, Morals, and Manners: The Culture of the French and the American Upper-Middle Class (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992); Michele Lamont and Marcel Fournier, eds., Cultivating Differences: Symbolic Boundaries and the Making of Inequality (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992); Michele Lamont, The Dignity of Working Men: Morality and the Boundaries of Race, Class, and Immigration (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000).

7. US Census Bureau, American Community Surveys, 2005 to 2009, electronic data file, residents in nonurban towns of twenty-five thousand or less in 2010, with median household income in 2009 averaging approximately $40,000; 3.3 percent of households in these communities earned more than $150,000.

8. These stereotypical characteristics are largely confirmed in a study by Donald D. Landon (Country Lawyers: The Impact of Context on Professional Practice [New York: Praeger, 1990]), in which more than a hundred lawyers living in communities of under 20,000 were compared with lawyers in a city of 150,000. Landon’s interviews are similar to mine in showing that small-town lawyers are heavily involved in local civic activities and at the same time emphasize the freedom from large-scale bureaucratic constraints that practicing in a small community provides.

9. US Census Bureau, residents of incorporated places, 2000, towns in non-urbanized areas; the percentage of adult residents age twenty-five and over who held a professional school degree or PhD, respectively, was 0.9 in towns of fewer than 1,000 people, 1.2 in towns of 1,000 to 1,900 residents, 1.5 in towns of 2,000 to 4,999, 1.8 in towns of 5,000 to 9,999, and 2.2 in towns of 10,000 to 24,999. In towns greater than 25,000, the percentage was 3.2.

10. In his book Golf and the American Country Club (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2001), Richard J. Moss estimates that there were a thousand US country clubs by 1900 and four thousand by 1930. For an emphasis on status distinctions and exclusivity in these clubs, see James M. Mayo, The American Country Club: Its Origins and Development (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1998).

11. US Census Bureau, American Community Surveys, 2005 to 2009, electronic data file, residents in nonurban towns of twenty-five thousand or less in 2010. The percentages employed in these various service industries in small nonurban towns do not differ significantly from the percentages in larger communities, with the exception of finance and insurance, which rises from 4 percent in smaller towns to 8 percent in large cities.

12. For a description of the history and work of county extension agents, see Anne W. Van den Ban and H. S. Hawkins, Agricultural Extension (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996). On its early development, see Edmund de Schweinitz Brunner, Rural America and the Extension Service: A History and Critique of the Cooperative Agricultural and Home Economics Extension Service (New York: Columbia University Press, 1949).

13. US Census Bureau, American Community Surveys, 2005 to 2009, electronic data files.

14. Estimates from the 2005 to 2009 American Community Surveys and data from the 2000 decennial census showed that the mean number of workers employed in manufacturing was 29 in nonurban towns of under 1,000, down from 33 in 2000; 98 in towns of 1,000 to 1,999, down from 112 in 2000; 201 in towns of 2,000 to 4,999, down from 233 in 2000; 423 in towns of 5,000 to 9,999, down from 499 in 2000; and 896 in towns of 10,000 to 24,999, down from 1,033 in 2000.

15. Examples are included in subsequent chapters.

16. The data in the figure are from the American Community Surveys conducted by the US Census Bureau and aggregated from 2005 through 2009.

17. Thorstein Veblen, The Theory of the Leisure Class (1899; repr., New York: Penguin Books, 1967), 88–89.

18. Anne Norton, Republic of Signs: Liberal Theory and American Popular Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 47–86.

19. Carrie L. Yodanis, “Producing Social Class Representations: Women’s Work in a Rural Town,” Gender and Society 16 (2002): 323–44.

20. General Social Surveys, 1982–84, electronic data file, courtesy of the National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago. The surveys included 593 respondents who lived in nonmetropolitan towns of fewer than 20,000 residents along with 2,251 respondents who lived in larger cities or suburbs. We asked a subset of our interviewees how they would rate their own home in relation to other homes in the community. As in the survey, most responses were in the average to slightly above or slightly below average range.

21. Among those living in above average or far above average homes, the percentages, respectively, in nonmetropolitan towns of fewer than twenty thousand residents and all larger communities were as follows: church, 54 and 39; literary or arts organizations, 16 and 13; farm organizations, 10 and 5; nationality organizations, 7 and 5; school fraternities, 12 and 9; hobby organizations, 14 and 12; youth organizations, 16 and 11; veterans organizations, 16 and 5; service organizations, 22 and 15; and fraternal organizations, 16 and 13.

22. Mr. Helder summarized his sense of community mindedness by observing that things like helping someone who needs fuel oil “are taken care of because, like I say, it reaches a point where even though it isn’t blood family, there are people who recognize that I survive because you survive.”

3. GOING TO BE BURIED RIGHT HERE: SMALL-TOWN IDENTITIES THAT BIND

1. US Census Bureau, population of incorporated places, 2000, electronic data file. In nonurbanized towns of under 25,000, 19 percent of the residents on average had lived in a different county five years previously. That compared with 24 percent in urbanized towns of more than 25,000. Among nonurbanized towns, the proportion rose from 18 percent in towns of fewer than 1,000 residents to 24 percent in towns of 10,000 to 24,999 residents. The highest proportions were in Colorado and Nevada, where 30 percent had not lived in the same county five years previously, and the lowest were in Louisiana, Mississippi, and West Virginia, with 15 percent having moved. Data from the 1980 US Census Bureau showed that 20 percent of residents in nonurbanized towns of under 25,000 had lived in a different county five years previously.

2. Ferdinand Tönnies, Community and Civil Society, ed. Jose Harris (1887; repr., Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 22–51.

3. General Social Surveys, conducted by the National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago, electronic data files, in which 1,143 respondents surveyed between 1998 and 2008 were classified as living in a nonmetro-politan town of fewer than 20,000 residents. Of these, 42 percent had been raised on a farm or in the open country, and 38 had been raised in a town of under 50,000 residents. Comparable results are evident in the Civic Involvement Survey, electronic data file (hereafter referred to simply as the Civic Involvement Survey). I designed the survey, and the Gallup Organization conducted the field research during January and February 1997 among 1,528 nationally representative respondents. For further information about the survey, see Robert Wuthnow, Loose Connections: Joining Together in America’s Fragmented Communities (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998). For the present purposes, I reanalyzed the data by identifying respondents who lived outside a Standard Metropolitan Statistical Area (MSA) and described their community as a small town. Among the 232 respondents so classified, 77 percent said they had grown up in a small town or rural area, 12 percent said they had grown up in a city, and 10 percent said they had grown up in a suburb. People currently living in a small town inside a Standard MSA were also likely to have grown up in a small town or rural area: 62 percent of these 294 respondents had grown up in a small town or rural area, 17 percent grew up in a city, and 22 percent in a suburb. Among the 642 respondents currently living in a suburb, 29 percent had been raised in a small town, 22 percent in a city, and 48 percent in a suburb. Among the 359 respondents currently living in a central city, 28 percent had been raised in a small town, 50 percent in a city, and 20 percent in a suburb.

4. Information about jobs, marriage, and other circumstances shaping people’s choices to live in small towns will be provided in chapter 5.

5. Because an extensive literature has developed in sociology about the distinctions among reasons, warrants, accounts, motives, and related concepts, it is crucial to understand that what people say they like or dislike about their towns may be among the reasons they have chosen to live there—or as after-the-fact justifications—but are better regarded simply as straightforward expressions of what they do or do not appreciate about where they live. In pilot interviews, respondents often had difficulty identifying one thing they liked or disliked the most, so the standard question asked for three things. To prompt beyond short answers, such as “the people” or “it feels secure,” respondents were asked to explain why each of the things they mentioned was important to them. Dislikes were elicited by asking specifically what aspects of the town respondents did not like or would change if they could. For a discussion of some of the most relevant sociological literature, see Stephen Vaisey, “Motivation and Justification: A Dual-Process Model of Culture in Action,” American Journal of Sociology 114 (2009): 1675–715; Terri L. Orbuch, “People’s Accounts Count: The Sociology of Accounts,” Annual Review of Sociology 23 (1997): 455–78. For the classic source, see C. Wright Mills, “Situated Actions and Vocabularies of Motive,” American Sociological Review 5 (1940): 904–13. For a more recent extended theoretical treatment, see Luc Boltanski and Laurent Thevenot, On Justification: Economies of Worth (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006).

6. US Census Bureau, electronic data file, population data for 14,232 incorporated towns in nonurbanized areas and having fewer than twenty-five thousand residents in 1980. The states in which the fewest small towns experienced either decline or growth averaging more than 1 percent annually over the next quarter century were Maine, New York, and Vermont. Other states with relatively low rates of growth and decline in small towns were Illinois, Indiana, Kentucky, Michigan, Mississippi, New Hampshire, and Ohio.

7. Walter Perrig and Walter Kintsch, “Propositional and Situational Representations of Text,” Journal of Memory and Language 24 (1985): 511. The authors highlight differences in the coherence of propositions in the text. Also evident in this experiment is the importance of egocentric or viewpoint representation, which develops through performance within a spatial context; see in Timothy P. McNamara, Julia Sluzenski, and Björn Rump, “Human Spatial Memory and Navigation,” in Learning and Memory: A Comprehensive Reference, Volume 2, ed. Henry L. Roediger III (New York: Elsevier, 2008), 157–78.

8. Poll data suggest that a slower-paced life is preferred by a majority of Americans, no matter where they live, but is especially valued among residents of small towns. For example, a 2008 survey conducted by the Pew Research Center showed that 71 percent of those who responded preferred to live in a community with a slower-paced lifestyle, compared with only 22 percent who preferred a faster pace. Eighty-five percent of those who claimed to live in a small town preferred a slower pace, as did 89 percent of those in rural areas, compared with 71 percent in suburbs and only 39 percent in cities. See Paul Taylor, Rich Morin, Kim Parker, D’Vera Cohn, and Wendy Wang, “For Nearly Half of America, Grass Is Greener Somewhere Else,” Pew Research Center Social and Demographic Trends Report, January 29, 2009, http://www.pewsocialtrends.org.

9. The relation between small towns, the air, space, and breathing was mentioned frequently in our interviews. For example, “I’ve got some room to breathe here,” another man said, noting that he could drive two hours in any direction and not be in a city. While he meant that metaphorically, he also felt the air was healthier where he lived than in urban areas.

10. Echoing the sentiments of the woman who felt unable to breathe in a city, a woman in another town explained that her husband was unable to breathe when they visited their son in a city, and she herself missed seeing the sky and watching the clouds.

11. Civic Involvement Survey. While these responses distinguished residents of small nonmetropolitan towns from those in other communities, the differences were most evident with residents of central cities and relatively small with residents of suburbs. For example, 89 percent of suburban respondents and 76 percent in central cities described their communities as comfortable; 85 percent and 66 percent, respectively, said their communities were quiet; 10 and 29 percent, respectively, said their communities were exciting; and 24 and 23 percent, respectively, said their communities were dull or boring.

12. Marc H. Bornstein and Helen G. Bornstein, “The Pace of Life,” Nature 259 (1976): 557–58. The research involved measuring the time in which people observed on the street walked a distance of fifty feet; measurements were taken for 309 subjects in fifteen sites in six countries, but were mostly conducted in large cities.

13. Robert V. Levine and Ara Norenzayan, “The Pace of Life in 31 Countries,” Journal of Cross-cultural Psychology 30 (1999): 178–205.

14. Aaron Lowin, Joseph H. Hottes, Bruce E. Sandler, and Marc Bornstein, “The Pace of Life and Sensitivity to Time in Urban and Rural Settings: A Preliminary Study,” Journal of Social Psychology 83 (1971): 247–53.

15. For one source of more recent evidence, an electronic data file for a nationally representative sample of 13,038 persons, of whom 2,582 were classified as living in nonmetropolitan areas (no other geographic information was released), see US Bureau of Labor Statistics, American Time Use Survey, 2005: Respondent and Activity Summary File Codebook (Ann Arbor, MI: Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research, 2005). Among the relevant items, no differences between metropolitan and nonmetropolitan residents were evident in the mean minutes recorded in time-use diaries for time spent with friends or sleeping. From ordinary least-squares regression models, the predicted values adjusted for age differences showed that men in nonmetropolitan areas spent 38 percent more time on lawn and garden activities than men in metropolitan areas (unfortunately, differences between suburban and center-city residents could not be compared), and men in nonmetropolitan areas spent 22 percent less time traveling to work than men in metropolitan areas (no significant differences were evident among women on either measure). The most notable difference between nonmetropolitan and metropolitan residents was on an item labeled “relaxing and thinking”; men age eighteen through twenty-nine in nonmetropolitan areas spent 38 percent less time relaxing and thinking than men of the same age in metropolitan areas (the comparable difference for young women was 19 percent less time in nonmetropolitan areas), but for both men and women in their thirties, forties, fifties, and older, nonmetropolitan residents spent more time relaxing and thinking than metropolitan residents, with differences ranging from 24 percent among men age thirty through forty-four to 48 percent among women of the same age. Other items, such as waiting time at the bank or time spent traveling to purchase groceries, did not show significant differences, but also were recorded in time-diaries too infrequently to warrant solid conclusions and could not be compared among sufficiently detailed locations. One possible conclusion from this evidence along with psychological experiments is that pace of life has less to do with clocked time than it does with cultural perceptions about the differences among places.

16. We also found people, though, who discovered that moving back to a small town and expecting it to be like their childhood community was disappointing. For example, a woman in California who had recently moved with her husband to the town in which he had been raised after having lived elsewhere for four decades remarked, “He lived here for the first twenty-six years of his life. He had very close friends who he had been raised with. And when we came back, they had stayed here, but we had zero in common. It was devastating for him. Most of the people we’re close friends with now are not from here.”

17. Michael Mayerfeld Bell, “The Ghosts of Place,” Theory and Society 26 (1997): 813–36.

18. On sensory stimuli, see, for example, Alan F. Collins, Martin A. Conway, and Peter E. Morris, eds., Theories of Memory (London: Taylor and Francis, 1993). On the role of places and tangible objects, see Eviatar Zerubavel, “Social Memories: Steps to a Sociology of the Past,” Qualitative Sociology 19 (1996): 283–99; Paul Connerton, How Societies Remember (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989); Michael Schudson, Watergate in American Memory: How We Remember, Forget, and Reconstruct the Past (New York: Basic Books, 1992); Barry Schwartz, “The Social Context of Commemoration: A Study in Collective Memory,” Social Forces 61 (1982): 374–96.

19. Small towns as good, safe places in which to raise children was a theme in many of the interviews. A nice example was this comment from a father of three children who lived in a town of thirteen hundred located more than eighty miles from the nearest city. “My wife’s sisters come [out from the city] and say, ‘Where are the kids?’ and we say, ‘I don’t know.’ ” He laughs and continues. “Her sisters are used to having to be concerned about are the kids still out in the front yard and we don’t worry about that. Last night I was in the house and my wife said, ‘Did you know [name of daughter] wasn’t in the yard?’ and I said, ‘No, I guess I didn’t,’ but she was over two houses down. I wasn’t worried about that.”

20. Perceptions of crime in small towns are complicated. Although residents we interviewed generally insisted that crime was low and safety was high in their towns, they acknowledged, when asked, that drug use (especially methamphetamines) and alcoholism were present in their communities, and led to occasional robberies, arrests, and automobile accidents. While crime was not absent from their perceptions, residents were able to think of it as the exception to the rule, rather than the rule. They accounted for it not as some mysterious or endemic and uncontrollable problem but as the work of a drug dealer who had come to town, a sheriff lax in enforcing the law, or a bad seed who needed to be locked up. National data drawn from the US Census Bureau County Data electronic data file and merged with the data file for towns shows that the rate of crime was lower in 2008 than it had been in 1988 for places of all size, and that in the counties in which nonrural towns were located, it varied in 2008 from a low of 240 crimes per 10,000 persons for towns with fewer than 1,000 residents to 320 crimes per 10,000 persons for towns with 10,000 to 25,000 residents, both of which were significantly lower than the rate of 409 crimes per 10,000 persons in cities with 100,000 to 250,000 residents and 479 crimes per 10,000 persons in cities with more than 1 million residents. The data also suggest that violent crime varies more with town size than property crime.

21. Sociological work suggests that authenticity is culturally defined and that its meaning varies from one social context to another, but that concerns about authenticity may also be driven by social change along with the sense that something of the past has been lost in the transition from agrarian to industrial and from industrial to postindustrial society. For an interesting review of the literature, see Rebecca J. Erickson, “The Importance of Authenticity for Self and Society,” Symbolic Interaction 18 (1995): 121–44. On the social construction of seemingly real or false meanings of authenticity, see Dean MacCannell, “Staged Authenticity: Arrangements of Social Space in Tourist Settings,” American Journal of Sociology 79 (1973): 589–603; Richard A. Peterson, Creating Country Music: Fabricating Authenticity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999). For studies that discuss the quest for authenticity as an attraction of small towns, see Catherine M. Cameron and John B. Gatewood, “The Authentic Interior: Questing Gemeinschaft in Post-industrial Society,” Human Organization 53 (1994): 21–32; Japonica Brown-Saracino, “Social Preservationists and the Quest for Authentic Community,” City and Community 3 (2004): 135–56.

22. US Census Bureau, incorporated places and New England towns, 2010, electronic data file, population per town divided by square miles per town times square feet per mile.

23. E. A. Ross, Changing America: Studies in Contemporary Society (Chautauqua, NY: Chautauqua Press, 1915), 157.

24. Sonya Salamon, “From Hometown to Nontown: Rural Community Effects of Suburbanization,” Rural Sociology 68 (2003): 17–18.

25. For a discussion of this research, see Matt Richtel, “Digital Devices Deprive Brain of Needed Downtime,” New York Times, August 24, 2010.

26. On the conditions underpinning the modern quest for personal authenticity, see of course Lionel Trilling, Sincerity and Authenticity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1972); and the further development of these ideas in Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self: The Making of Modern Identity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989) and Charles Taylor, Multiculturalism: Examining the Politics of Recognition (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994).

27. US Department of Agriculture, Economic Research Service, “Natural Amenities Scale,” 2004, http://www.ers.usda.gov. The scale provides scores at the county level. I merged the county-level data with the electronic data file for incorporated places and New England towns from the 2010 US Census to obtain an estimate of amenities scores for towns. The scale is especially sensitive to latitude and temperature. For example, towns with low scores are located in latitudes such as those represented by Minnesota and North Dakota, whereas towns with high scores are in latitudes such as those represented by Virginia and Oklahoma. The mean January temperature of towns with the lowest scores is ten degrees while the mean January temperature of towns with the highest scores is forty-five degrees.

28. In the Civic Involvement Survey, 30 percent of respondents in small non-metropolitan communities said they were “very satisfied” with cultural events in their community, 27 percent of respondents in small metropolitan towns gave this response, as did 30 percent of respondents in central cities and 27 percent in suburbs.

29. Albert Blumenthal, Small-Town Stuff (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1932), especially 128–43; Nels Anderson, “Review of Small-Town Stuff,” American Journal of Sociology 38 (1932): 294.

30. For an interesting discussion of how the rumor mill works among new immigrants, see Joanna Dreby, “Gender and Transnational Gossip,” Qualitative Sociology 32 (2009): 33–52. For essays examining the constructive functions of gossip, see Robert F. Goodman and Aaron Ben-Ze’ev, eds., Good Gossip (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2004).

31. My own view about the larger question of community collapse is that Americans have always been and remain individualistic, and have been able to reconcile this individualism with a healthy degree of participation in voluntary and other community activities. The form of these activities has changed, but it is hard to assert convincingly that an overall decline has taken place. In this, I mostly agree with Claude S. Fischer’s observation in Made in America: A Social History of American Culture and Character (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010), 10, that he is “unpersuaded by assertions of revolutionary change …. and [is] more impressed by continuity over the centuries.” For my arguments about individualism and altruistic activities as well as changes in the form of community activities, see Robert Wuthnow, Acts of Compassion: Caring for Others and Helping Ourselves (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1991); Wuthnow, Loose Connections.

32. The Economic Research Services division of the US Department of Agriculture has developed a classification scheme that places US counties in one of six economic categories: farming dependent, mining dependent, manufacturing dependent, federal and state government dependent, services dependent, and non-specialized. By merging the electronic data files from the 2000 census for incorporated places with the county data, the proportion of nonurban towns of less than twenty-five thousand residents that fall into each category is as follows: farming dependent, 11 percent; mining dependent, 3 percent; manufacturing dependent, 29 percent; federal and state government dependent, 10 percent; services dependent, 14 percent; and nonspecialized, 33 percent. Between 1980 and 2008, 29 percent of the towns in farming dependent counties declined in population by at least 25 percent, as did 25 percent of the towns in mining dependent counties; that compared with 15 percent in manufacturing counties, 17 percent in federal and state government counties, 14 percent in services counties, and 18 percent in nonspecialized counties. Respectively, the proportions of towns in each economic category that grew by at least 25 percent during these years was 13 percent, 14 percent, 18 percent, 23 percent, 25 percent, and 20 percent.

33. US Census Bureau, incorporated places in all states and towns classified as minor civil divisions in New England states and New York, 1980 and 2010, electronic data file. The figure shows the percentage of towns outside urbanized areas in 1980 by size that had smaller populations than they did in 2010. The percentages are based on 9,162 towns with populations under 1,000 in 1980, 2,874 towns with populations between 1,000 and 2,000, 2,435 towns with populations between 2,000 and 5,000, 925 towns with populations between 5,000 and 10,000, and 518 towns with populations between 10,000 and 25,000.

34. Although many of the residents we interviewed talked about real or expected population decline in absolute numbers, relative decline was of concern in other instances, even when towns were experiencing modest population growth. An indication of relative decline is that mean population of all nonurban towns with fewer than twenty-five thousand residents in 1980 increased by 19.3 percent between 1980 and 2010, compared with an increase of 30.6 percent for all towns, and 63 percent among towns of under twenty-five thousand that had the good fortune of being in urban areas.

35. In the figure, decline is defined as population in 1980 being greater than population in 2010, and major decline as the 2010 population being less than or equal to 75 percent of the 1980 population. From ordinary least squares regression for 2010 population as the dependent variable, controlling for 1980 population, towns had 354 fewer residents in 2010 for each reduction of one point on the natural amenities scale.

36. The data in the figure are taken from Economic Research Service county classifications conducted in 2004 and merged with the data for towns. Among nonurban towns of twenty-five thousand population or less in 2010, 11.1 percent were located in farming dependent counties, 2.7 percent in mining dependent counties, 32.1 percent in manufacturing dependent counties, 35.3 percent in non-specialized counties, and 8.9 percent in service dependent counties.

37. For an analysis of the agricultural and geographic factors associated with population decline among approximately two-thirds of the fifty-five hundred towns in the Middle West, see Robert Wuthnow, Remaking the Heartland: Middle America since the 1950s (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2011). In the Civic Involvement Survey, 26 percent of residents of small nonmetropolitan towns described their communities as “declining,” which was higher than the 20 percent in small metropolitan towns and 19 percent in suburbs who gave the same response, but lower than the 41 percent in central cities who said their community was declining.

38. The relationship between population decline and incomes in small towns is complex. In American Agriculture in the Twentieth Century: How It Flourished and What It Cost (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002), 113, Bruce L. Gardner writes, “Data are not available on income levels for particular towns, so we cannot compare incomes in shrinking and growing towns.” That is not the case, however. The census data used here for incorporated places does include measures for particular towns, including median household income. For the non-urbanized towns with populations of less than twenty-five thousand in 1980, I compared median household incomes in 1979 and 2009 among towns that had declined in population by 25 percent or more, less than 25 percent, no decline but less than 25 percent increase, and 25 percent or more increase. Compared with the average change among all nonurban small towns, median household incomes fell by 4 percent in the towns with major decline, fell by 5 percent in towns with minor decline, remained the same in towns with stable or minor increases, and increased by 10 percent in towns with major growth.

39. Employment in the Minnesota iron ore industry grew from approximately eight thousand in 1972 to fourteen thousand in 1979, but dropped precipitously to less than six thousand in 1982 and was below four thousand in 2005, for an overall drop of 83 percent since the mid-1960s. See Thomas Michael Power, The Economic Role of Metal Mining in Minnesota: Past, Present, and Future: A Re port Prepared for Minnesota Center for Environmental Advocacy and the Sierra Club (Missoula: University of Montana, Economics Department, 2007). For a valuable case study of the impact of a plant closure on one small community, see Carol D. Miller, Niagara Falling: Globalization in a Small Town (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2007).

40. Other residents we interviewed in the same community expressed varying views of the mine’s closure and railroad’s layoffs. One interpretation was that the mine’s equipment was so old that replacing it had become too costly for the company. Another was that the government had not done enough to protect domestic mining companies from foreign competition. Yet another was that the company had been forced into bankruptcy by having to pay high union wages and generous pension benefits. Residents agreed that the community had faced decades of ups and downs with the mining company, and somehow would survive.

41. As I discussed previously, and as shown in figure 3.5.

42. The data in the figure are from my analysis of the electronic data file from the 2006 Cooperative Congressional Election Survey, a nationally representative survey including 35,816 respondents with identifying information available at the county level. For questions, methodology, and information about response rates, see Stephen Ansolabehere, Guide to the 2006 Cooperative Congressional Election Survey (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2010). Regular Walmart shoppers were identified by two questions that asked first whether the respondent shopped at Walmart at all, and if yes, whether that was regular or less often. Using 2005 US Census Bureau data, I classified respondents by the population of the county in which they lived, and whether the county was located outside or within a combined statistical area.

43. Although much of the public debate about Walmart has focused on larger metropolitan areas in which Walmart was or was not welcomed, for an insightful discussion of the ways in which Walmart has cultivated small-town values, such as thrift, family, and community, see Rebekah Peeples Massengill, Wal-Mart Wars: Moral Populism in the Twenty-First Century (New York: New York University Press, 2013). Massengill also notes the connection between Walmart’s public persona and evangelical religious orientations. For more on this topic, see Bethany Moreton, To Serve God and Walmart: The Making of Christian Free Enterprise (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009).

44. Although it is true on average that housing is cheaper in small towns than in cities and suburbs, and many of our interviewees mentioned this fact, there were townspeople who said their family budgets were strained because they had made a decision to pay more for housing and earn a lower salary given that they wanted to live in a rural area as well as perhaps purchase a small plot of land to do hobby farming or keep a horse. At the lower end of the housing market, an indication of differences between small towns and cities is that data estimated from the 2005 to 2009 aggregated US Census Bureau American Community Surveys showed that 35 percent of owner-occupied houses in nonurban towns of under a thousand residents were valued at less than $50,000, compared with 17 percent in nonurban towns of ten to twenty-five thousand residents, and only 7 percent in urban towns ranging from as small as twenty-five thousand to as large as a million or more. In the same data, median values of owner-occupied housing ranged from $87,120 in the smallest nonurban towns, to $142,902 in nonurban towns of ten to fifteen thousand, to approximately $280,000 in urban towns of fifty thousand or more.

45. Data estimated from the 2005 to 2009 aggregated American Community Surveys. Comparable data in the 2000 census was reported as the mean commuting time, which declined from 25.4 minutes in the smallest nonurban towns to 19.3 minutes in nonurban towns of ten to twenty-five thousand, and rose to 29.4 minutes in cities of a million or more.

46. The data in the figure are from the US Census Bureau, incorporated places and New England towns, 2010, electronic data files.

47. These results are drawn from the electronic data files for incorporated places and New England municipal subdivisions from the aggregated 2005 to 2009 American Community Surveys conducted by the US Census Bureau and released in 2011.

48. On segmented assimilation, see especially Alejandro Portes and Min Zhou, “The New Second Generation: Segmented Assimilation and Its Variants,” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 530 (1993): 74-96; Min Zhou, “Segmented Assimilation: Issues, Controversies, and Recent Research on the New Second Generation,” International Migration Review 31 (1997): 975–1008; Roger Waldinger and Cynthia Feliciano, “Will the New Second Generation Experience ‘Downward Assimilation’? Segmented Assimilation Re-assessed,” Ethnic and Racial Studies 27 (2004): 376–402; Alejandro Portes and Patricia Fernandez-Kelly, “Segmented Assimilation on the Ground: The New Second Generation in Early Adulthood,” Ethnic and Racial Studies 28 (2005): 1000–1040; Alejandro Portes, “Migration, Development, and Segmented Assimilation: A Conceptual Review of the Evidence,” Annals of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences 610 (2007): 73–97.

49. For a good discussion of these cultural changes, based partly on research conducted in a small community, see Tomas R. Jimenez, Replenished Ethnicity: Mexican Americans, Immigration, and Identity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009); Tomas R. Jimenez, “Mexican-Immigrant Replenishment and the Continuing Significance of Ethnicity and Race,” American Journal of Sociology 113 (2008): 1527–67.

50. It might be supposed that residents of small homogeneous towns would be more resistant to immigrants than residents of cities that are already more diverse. Attitudinal data show relatively small differences, though. For example, the Religion and Diversity Survey that I conducted in 2003 found that 70 percent of residents in small nonmetropolitan towns favored a law to reduce immigration, but that figure was only 8 percent higher than the response among residents of metropolitan areas. On another question, 72 percent of small town residents agreed that the United States owes a great deal to the immigrants who came here, only 6 points lower than the response in metropolitan areas. Clearer indications came from our qualitative interviews that showed relatively little affect one way or the other in towns having experienced little direct impact from immigration, and comments ranging from very positive to very negative in towns with high rates of immigration.

51. Data in the figure are calculated from the aggregated 2005 to 2009 American Community Surveys, and pertain to towns that include both Hispanic and White Anglo residents, the number of which was 5,052 for nonurban towns of 25,000 residents or less, and 9,284 for all towns. Median incomes were higher among Hispanics than among White Anglos in 1,831 of the 5,052 nonurban small towns.

52. For evidence of frequent human rights violations in meat and poultry plants, see Human Rights Watch, Blood, Sweat, and Fear: Workers’ Rights in U.S. Meat and Poultry Plants (Washington, DC: Human Rights Watch, 2005). See also Georgeanne M. Artz, Peter F. Orazem, and Daniel M. Otto, “Meat Packing and Processing Facilities in the Non-metropolitan Midwest: Blessing or Curse?” (paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Agricultural Economics Association, Providence, Rhode Island, July 2005); Georgeanne M. Artz, Peter F. Orazem, and Daniel M. Otto, “Measuring the Impact of Meat Packing and Processing Facilities in Nonmetropolitan Counties: A Difference-in-Differences Approach,” American Journal of Agricultural Economics 89 (2007): 557–70. For two studies of Postville, Iowa, a meat-processing community of twenty-two hundred people, offering local perspective on ethnic diversity along with conflicts about immigration and undocumented workers, see Stephen G. Bloom, Postville: A Clash of Cultures in Heartland America (New York: Mariner Books, 2001); Mark Grey, Michele Devlin, and Aaron Goldsmith, Postville U.S.A.: Surviving Diversity in Small-Town America (Boston: Gemma Media, 2009).

4. COMMUNITY SPIRIT: SMALL-TOWN IDENTITIES THAT BIND

1. Religion and Diversity Survey, a nationally representative survey conducted under my direction in 2003; see Robert Wuthnow, America and the Challenges of Religious Diversity (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005). There were 611 respondents in this survey who lived outside a Census-defined MSA and identified their community as a small city or town or rural area, and 1,807 respondents who lived in an MSA and identified their community as a city or suburb. Respectively, 44 and 14 percent said they knew almost all their neighbors, 13 and 10 percent said they knew half their neighbors, 12 and 17 percent knew only a quarter, 27 and 48 percent knew only a few of their neighbors, and 4 and 10 percent knew nobody in their neighborhood.

2. Sociologists have long been interested in the idea that “everyone knows everyone” in small towns. Writing in 1903, Georg Simmel (“The Metropolis and Mental Life,” in Georg Simmel, On Individuality and Social Forms, ed. Donald N. Levine [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1971], 331) took the fact that “one knows almost every person he meets” in a small town as evidence that social relations necessarily were different (reserved and even cold) in larger places. Louis Wirth (“Urbanism as a Way of Life,” American Journal of Sociology 44 [1938]: 1–24) incorporated this argument into his own treatment of the significance of population size. Offering a somewhat-different interpretation, Claude S. Fischer (To Dwell among Friends: Personal Networks in Town and City [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982], 61, citing David Hummon, “Popular Images of the American Small Town,” Landscape 24 [1980]: 3–9) emphasizes that “such public familiarity need have nothing to do with people’s private lives.”

3. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1991), 6.

4. These results are from my Civic Involvement Survey. Among respondents in metropolitan areas, 41 percent said community meant their neighborhood; among residents of small towns in nonmetropolitan areas, 43 percent said community meant their town.

5. Paul Lichterman, Elusive Togetherness: Church Groups Trying to Bridge America’s Divisions (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005). Lichterman’s extended ethnographic research was conducted in a city of approximately 235,000 residents, and was especially concerned with the ways in which various religious service organizations bridged racial and social class differences. He found that social ties that bridged these differences usually focused only on individuals, whereas the one group that deliberately emphasized larger social categories was more effective at addressing underlying issues. See also Paul Lichterman, “Social Capital or Group Style? Rescuing Tocqueville’s Insights on Civic Engagement,” Theory and Society 35 (2006): 529–63; Paul Lichterman, “Integrating Diversity: Boundaries, Bonds, and the Greater Community in The New Golden Rule,” in Autonomy and Order: A Communitarian Anthology, ed. Edward Lehman (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2000), 125–41. The tendency in US culture to stress charity and volunteering as individual acts of kindness has often been observed in the literature. See, for example, Christian Smith and Michael O. Emerson, Passing the Plate: Why American Christians Don’t Give Away More Money (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008); Robert L. Payton and Michael P. Moody, Understanding Philanthropy: Its Meaning and Mission (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2008); Susan Eckstein, “Community as Gift-Giving: Collectivistic Roots of Volunteerism,” American Sociological Review 66 (2001): 829–51; Robert Wuthnow, Acts of Compassion: Caring for Others and Helping Ourselves (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1991). Conversely, some of the popular difficulty in recognizing social categories is that these are the bases of inequality that are difficult to acknowledge. See, for example, Douglas Massey, Categorically Unequal: The American Stratification System (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 2007).

6. For the most able development and defense of the argument that community is declining because numerical measures of social capital in surveys show downward trends, see Robert D. Putnam, Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2000). Criticisms of this contention have emphasized the replacement of older forms of social participation with newer ones, and changing political, legal, and cultural forms of organization. See, for example, Carl Boggs, “Social Capital and Political Fantasy: Robert Putnam’s ‘Bowling Alone,’ ” Theory and Society 30 (2001): 281–97. For one of the more interesting studies of changing forms of civic involvement, see Emily Barman, Contesting Communities: The Transformation of Workplace Charity (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2006). The emphasis on community as symbol and narrative that I have in mind here is similar and indebted to the nicely developed argument in Mario Luis Small, Villa Victoria: The Transformation of Social Capital in a Boston Barrio (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004).

7. In the Civic Involvement Survey, respondents were asked if they had attended meetings about community issues in the past year, and among those who had, 69 percent in small nonmetropolitan towns said the meeting had been held at the school; that compared with 59 percent in suburbs and 52 percent in central cities.

8. NCES, Schools and Staffing Surveys, 1987 and 1999, electronic data files, weighted sample results for number of schools and total K–12 enrollment in the United States by locale, where small town was defined by the NCES as an incorporated or census-designated place with a population less than 25,000 yet greater than or equal to 2,500, and located outside a Consolidated MSA or MSA, and a rural locale was defined as any territory designated as rural by the Census Bureau. Between 1987 and 1999, the number of schools estimated in these surveys fell from 18,556 to 11,393 in small towns, and from 19,391 to 16,578 in rural areas, while increasing from 19,482 to 21,895 in large or midsize central cities and from 21,132 to 37,761 in urban-fringe areas of large or midsize cities or large towns. Estimated total school enrollment between 1987 and 1999 declined from 9.5 to 4.8 million in small towns and from 6.7 to 4.7 million in rural areas, while increasing from 13 to 14.3 million in central cities and from 13.3 to 23.8 million in urban-fringe areas. Another way of describing the change is that schools in small towns and rural areas made up 48 percent of the nation’s schools in 1987, but only 32 percent in 1999 and 37 percent of total enrollment in 1987 yet only 20 percent in 1999. The 1987 and 1999 surveys were used because the NCES definitions of locale changed in 2003 as a result of data collected in the 2000 decennial census (nces.ed.gov/ccd/rural_locales.asp). For a summary of the study, see National Center for Education Statistics, Schools and Staffing Survey, 1999–2000: Overview of the Data for Public, Private, Public Charter, and Bureau of Indian Affairs Elementary and Secondary Schools (Washington, DC: US Department of Education, Office of Educational Research and Improvement, 2002). The 2005 NCES data (electronic data file) in which the new definition of locale altered the categories for rural schools showed that the number of schools in towns of 2,500 to 25,000 declined from 11,393 in 1999 to 8,982 in 2005, a decrease of 21 percent, and that the number of students in small-town schools dropped from 4.8 million in 1999 to 3.5 million in 2005 (these numbers are derived from the five category locale variable in the electronic data file for school districts).

9. These numbers are from the 1980 and 2000 census, and represent children age five through seventeen in nonurbanized towns that had a total population in 1980 of fewer than twenty-five thousand.

10. As I discuss in chapter 6, empty storefronts are also something that residents considered damaging enough to community spirit that these buildings were razed or town leaders found ways to make them appear occupied. An empty school, however, where children had once played outside, and residents had attended graduation ceremonies and town meetings, held deeper symbolic significance. As one mayor remarked, “They closed the two-story brick schoolhouse down, and it sat empty for years and years and years. When something sits empty for so long, it just kind of becomes depressing.” She said an effort to reopen the building as a city hall was one of the best things that had happened lately.

11. For an extended example of the connection between sports and smalltown pride, see Joe Drape, Our Boys: A Perfect Season on the Plains with the Smith Center Redmen (New York: Times Books, 2009). Of related interest, see Carlton Stowers, Where Dreams Die Hard: A Small American Town and Its Six-Man Football Team (Cambridge, MA: Da Capo Press, 2005.

12. For a rich descriptive discussion of small-town festivals, see Robert H. Lavenda, Corn Fests and Water Carnivals: Celebrating Community in Minnesota (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1997). For a look at small-town rodeos, see Elizabeth Furniss, “Cultural Performance as Strategic Essentialism: Negotiating Indianness in a Western Canadian Rodeo Festival,” Humanities Research (1998): 23–40; Elizabeth Atwood Lawrence, Rodeo: An Anthropologist Looks at the Wild and the Tame (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1982); Stan Hoig, Cowtown Wichita and the Wild, Wicked West (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2007), especially 153–68.

13. See, for example, Karen De Bres and James Davis, “Celebrating Group and Place Identity: A Case study of a New Regional Festival,” Tourism Geographies 3 (2001): 326–37.

14. For a recent example of sociological theory in which the centrality of emotional experience, such as that generated by collective rituals, is emphasized, see Randall Collins, Interaction Ritual Chains (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005). For the classic work on this topic, see Emile Durkheim, Elementary Forms of the Religious Life, trans. Carol Cosman and ed. Mark S. Cladis (1915; repr., Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008).

15. For interesting discussions of the ways in which community festivals dramatize changing definitions of membership in the community in other contexts, see the following. On the annual festa and the role it played among immigrants from about 1890 to 1940, see Robert A. Orsi, The Madonna of 115th Street: Faith and Community in Italian Harlem (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1985). On how the festa changed with Haitian immigration, see Elizabeth Mc-Alister, “The Madonna of 115th Street Revisited: Vodou and Haitian Catholicism in the Age of Transnationalism,” in Gatherings in Diaspora: Religious Communities and the New Immigration, ed. R. Stephen Warner and Judith G. Wittner (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1998), 123–62; Karen McCarthy Brown, “Staying Grounded in a High-rise Building: Ecological Dissonance and Ritual Accommodation in Haitian Vodou,” in Gods of the City, ed. Robert A. Orsi (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999), 79–102; Jonathan Rieder, Canarsie: The Jews and Italians of Brooklyn against Liberalism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1985); Wesley Monroe Shrum Jr., Fringe and Fortune: The Role of Critics in High and Popular Art (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996). For an insightful discussion of the similar role that naturalization ceremonies play, see Sofya Aptekar, “Immigrant Naturalization and Nation-Building in North America” (PhD diss., Princeton University, 2010).

16. For a brief summary of Sampson’s research on collective efficacy, see Robert J. Sampson, “Neighborhood and Community: Collective Efficacy and Community Safety,” New Economy 11 (2004): 106–13. See also Robert J. Sampson, Stephen W. Raudenbush, and Felton Earls, “Neighborhoods and Violent Crime: A Multilevel Study of Collective Efficacy,” Science 277 (1997): 918–24; Jeffrey D. Morenoff, Robert J. Sampson, and Stephen W. Raudenbush, “Neighborhood Inequality, Collective Efficacy, and the Spatial Dynamics of Urban Violence,” Population Studies Center Research Report, Report No. 00-451, March 2001.

17. The data in the figure are from the approximately 2,500 respondents in the national survey of 3,003 adults conducted in July to November 2000 as part of the Social Capital Benchmark Survey, which also solicited information from 26,230 residents in forty-one local communities. I report the results from the national survey because most of the local surveys were conducted in cities. The electronic data file and codebook were obtained from the Roper Center for Public Opinion Research at the University of Connecticut.

18. Terry L. Besser, Nicholas Recker, and Kerry Agnitsch, “The Impact of Economic Shocks on Quality of Life and Social Capital in Small Towns,” Rural Sociology 73 (2008): 580–604. The study was conducted by a mailed survey among randomly selected residents in ninety-nine towns of under ten thousand population in 1994 and 2004. The results contrast with those of Kai T. Erikson (Everything in Its Path: Destruction of Community in the Buffalo Creek Flood [New York: Simon and Schuster, 1977]), who valuably examines the extent to which feelings about community are grounded in the spatial order of a town and are thus negatively affected by a natural disaster. Timothy Philip Schwartz-Barcott (After the Disaster: Re-creating Community and Well-being at Buffalo Creek since the Notorious Coal-Mining Disaster in 1972 [Amherst, NY: Cambria Press, 2008]), revisits Erikson’s argument, and shows how the residents rebuilt their sense of community and the structures undergirding it.

19. For an extensive discussion of warrants, see Kenneth Burke, A Grammar of Motives (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969). Relatedly, for an illuminating essay, see Wendell V. Harris, “The Critics Who Made Us: Kenneth Burke,” Sewanee Review 96 (1988): 452–63.

20. Jennifer Sherman, “Coping with Rural Poverty: Economic Survival and Moral Capital in Rural America,” Social Forces 85 (2006): 891–913.

21. For a sharp contrast between sidewalk behavior in small towns and what’s been described as “civil inattention,” see Erving Goffman, Behavior in Public Places: Notes on the Social Organization of Gatherings (New York: Free Press, 1966), 88–99. For a discussion of how the norms of civility also contrast with those in the urban setting, see Mitchell Duneier, Sidewalk (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2000); Mitchell Duneier and Harvey Molotch, “Talking City Trouble: Interactional Vandalism, Social Inequality, and the ‘Urban Interaction Problem,’ ” American Journal of Sociology 104 (1999): 1263–95.

22. For an engaging account of the “finger wave,” “highway howdy,” and “farmer’s salute,” see Roger Welsch, Forty Acres and a Fool: How to Live in the Country and Still Keep Your Sanity (Osceola, WI: Voyageur Press, 2006), 210–12.

23. Network studies point to the importance of overlapping ties that involve one’s friends also being friends with one another. In family research, see especially, for example, Elizabeth Bott, Family and Social Network (1957; repr., New York: Routledge, 2003); Joan Aldous and Murray A. Straus, “Social Networks and Conjugal Roles: A Test of Bott’s Hypothesis,” Social Forces 43 (1966): 471–82; Alexandra Maryanski and Masako Ishii-Kuntz, “A Cross-Species Application of Bott’s Hypothesis on Role Segregation and Social Networks,” Sociological Perspectives 34 (1991): 403–25. Formal studies of network ties rarely emphasize the significance of relationships in which intimate knowledge about third parties is disclosed. For a discussion of this phenomenon in greater detail, see Robert Wuthnow, “Intimate Knowledge as a Concept for Further Research in Studies of Religion,” Association of Religion Data Archives at the Pennsylvania State University, 2011, http://www.thearda.com/rrh/papers/guidingpapers.asp. The literature on secrecy and gossip is also suggestive; see, for example, Sissela Bok, Secrets: On the Ethics of Concealment and Revelation (New York: Pantheon, 1983); Donna Eder, “Cohesion through Collaborative Narration,” Social Psychology Quarterly 51 (1988): 225–35; Donna Eder, “The Structure of Gossip: Opportunities and Constraints on Collective Expression among Adolescents,” American Sociological Review 56 (1991): 494–508; Gary Alan Fine and Lori Holyfield, “Secrecy, Trust, and Dangerous Leisure: Generating Group Cohesion in Voluntary Organizations,” Social Psychology Quarterly 59 (1996): 22–38; Joshua Gamson, “Normal Sins: Sex Scandal Narratives as Institutional Morality Tales,” Social Problems 48 (2001): 185–205.

24. Riffraff was by far the most common term residents used to describe people who were not doing enough to take care of their own needs. The term also implies a stranger or newcomer who is not sufficiently vetted or known, and thus cannot be trusted. A related term is a sponger or someone who sponges off the system, such as abusing charity. A less commonly used term is packsacker, referring to someone who is not from the community but who can eventually be accepted over a course of years by showing themselves to be dependable, hardworking, and loyal to the community.

25. Gerald Marwell and Ruth E. Ames, “Experiments on the Provision of Public Goods, I. Resources, Interest Group Size, and the Free-Rider Problem,” American Journal of Sociology 84 (1979): 1335–60; Oliver Kim and Mark Walker, “The Free Rider Problem: Experimental Evidence,” Public Choice 43 (1984): 3–24.

26. One of my colleagues has written perceptively about this. See Viviana A. Zelizer, The Purchase of Intimacy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005); Viviana A. Zelizer, The Social Meaning of Money: Pin Money, Paychecks, Poor Relief, and Other Currencies (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994).

27. On the taboo against talking about money, see Robert Wuthnow, Poor Richard’s Principle: Recovering the American Dream through the Moral Dimension of Work, Business, and Money (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996), 138–68.

28. On the closure of social networks, see James S. Coleman, “Social Capital in the Creation of Human Capital,” American Journal of Sociology 94 (1988): S95–120. Coleman mentions gossip in passing, but mainly suggests that B and C knowing each other can produce a coalition that enforces normative conformity in A. But how this works is complicated in the information provided by small town residents. It is the perception that others might know as well as whatever possibilities of actual enforcement might exist that people emphasize, and not just any gossip that matters, but hearsay about topics that implies access to intimate, behind-the-scenes information.

29. Ray Oldenburg, The Great Good Place: Cafes, Coffee Shops, Community Centers, Beauty Parlors, General Stores, Bars, Hangouts, and How They Get You through the Day (New York: Paragon House, 1989). For a demonstration of the beneficial effects of “third place establishments” and “associations” on community well-being variables for small towns, see Charles M. Tolbert, Michael D. Irwin, Thomas A. Lyson, and Alfred R. Nucci, “Civic Community in Small-Town America: How Civic Welfare Is Influenced by Local Capitalism and Civic Engagement,” Rural Sociology 67 (2002): 90–113. Other studies that examine the conviviality that occurs in some of these specific settings have generally focused on urban places. See, for example, James P. Spradley and Brenda J. Mann, The Cocktail Waitress: Women’s Work in a Man’s World (1975; repr., New York: Waveland Press, 2008); William H. Whyte, The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces (1980; repr., New York: Project for Public Spaces, 2001); Mitchell Duneier, Slim’s Table: Race, Respectability, and Masculinity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992); Sean Safford, Why the Garden Club Couldn’t Save Youngstown: The Transformation of the Rust Belt (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009). On the importance of formal day-care centers in creating informal networks in an urban context, see Mario Luis Small, Unanticipated Gains: Origins of Network Inequality in Everyday Life (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009).

30. Susan Fiske (“Envy Up, Scorn Down: How Comparison Divides Us” [paper presented at the fall retreat of Law and Public Affairs, Princeton University, September 2010]) argues that scorn has been relatively neglected in the psychological literature, although in popular culture it generally involves looking down on someone who is regarded as inferior, expressing contempt or derision, wishing they would go away, giving them signals to stay away, and sometimes showing disdain for them by ignoring them or responding to them only with silence. While the person or group scorned may respond by feeling inferior, the more interesting dynamic, and the one I emphasize here, is how the scorned fight back, so to speak, by asserting values and traits they consider to negate the scorn. Historians of American literature note especially the disdain toward small towns and rural areas expressed in the work of Sinclair Lewis and F. Scott Fitzgerald; see, for example, James H. Shideler, “Flappers and Philosophers, and Farmers: Rural–Urban Tensions of the Twenties,” Agricultural History 47 (1973): 283–99. For a related work that examines contrasting imagery in English literature, though one less concerned specifically with small towns, see Raymond Williams, The Country and the City (London: Chatto and Windus, 1973). For a broader discussion of popular imagery that marginalizes and denigrates residents of small towns and rural areas, see Gerald W. Creed and Barbara Ching, “Recognizing Rusticity: Identity and the Power of Place,” in Knowing Your Place: Rural Identity and Cultural Hierarchy, ed. Barbara Ching and Gerald W. Creed (New York: Routledge, 1997), 1–38. For a book that traces the notion of the village idiot or rural idiocy to the Greek root, idios, “meaning ‘one’s own, a private person,’ unlearned in the ways of the polis,” and thus less civilized or civic spirited than urban residents, see Edward W. Soja, Postmodern Geographies: The Reassertion of Space in Critical Theory (London: Verso, 1989), 234–35.

31. Annie Proulx, That Old Ace in the Hole (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2002); Timothy Egan, The Worst Hard Time (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2006). For reviews by writers outside the region that praised the book’s accuracy, see Candace Smith, “That Old Ace in the Hole,” Booklist, May 1, 2003, 1213; Gail Caldwell, “Intruder in the Dust,” Boston Globe, December 15, 2002; Sean Daly, “That Old Ace in the Hole,” People, December 23, 2002; Stephen Finucan, “Fear and Loathing on the Panhandle,” Toronto Star, December 8, 2002. Reviewers closer to the region were more critical; see, for example, James Lough, “No Winning Hand,” Denver Post, December 15, 2002.

32. Although New York City came up from time to time in our interviews as a point of comparison, the distinctive speech patterns that once characterized the city do not appear to signal sophistication, according to an expert who explained, “A New York accent makes you sound ignorant” (quoted in Sam Roberts, “Unlearning to Tawk Like a New Yorker,” New York Times, November 19, 2010).

33. In the Civic Involvement Survey, 48 percent of respondents in small non-metropolitan towns said they were very satisfied with the “natural beauty” of their community, compared with 42 percent in small metropolitan towns, 35 percent in suburbs, and 31 percent in central cities.

34. Rebecca Kneale Gould, At Home in Nature: Modern Homesteading and Spiritual Practice in America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005).

35. William Wordsworth, The Complete Poetical Works (London: Macmillan, 1888); written in 1806.

36. LiErin Probasco, “Encountering Difference: Solidarity and Transnational Religious Humanitarian Aid” (PhD diss., Princeton University, 2013). I was involved in Probasco’s project as an adviser at the time I was doing the research for this book, and it provided vivid contrasting evidence. Americans who participated in visits to Nicaragua, and Probasco herself, frequently commented on the extended conversations and ritual events that were expected of visitors in Nicaraguan villages, whereas the newcomers I talked with in small towns noted expectations about sidewalk friendliness and brief conversations, but rarely suggested that these encounters took much time or had become burdensome.

5. THE FROG POND: MAKING SENSE OF WORK AND MONEY

1. Among the many works describing the American dream, for a valuable historical discussion, see Cal Jillson, Pursuing the American Dream: Opportunity and Exclusion over Four Centuries (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2004). For a work that emphasizes the expectation of leaving home and moving elsewhere, see Robert N. Bellah, Richard Madsen, William M. Sullivan, Ann Swidler, and Steven M. Tipton, Habits of the Heart: Individualism and Commitment in American Life (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985). For books that focus on the freedom of individual choice and expression versus community attachment, see Bellah et al., Habits of the Heart; Herbert J. Gans, Middle American Individualism: Political Participation and Liberal Democracy (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988); Paul Leinberger and Bruce Tucker, The New Individualists: The Generation after the Organization Man (New York: HarperCollins, 1991); Alan Ehrenhalt, The Lost City: The Forgotten Virtues of Community in America (New York: Basic Books, 1995). For my own research into popular understandings of the American dream, see Robert Wuthnow, Poor Richard’s Principle: Recovering the American Dream through the Moral Dimension of Work, Business, and Money (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996); Robert Wuthnow, American Mythos: Why Our Best Efforts to Be a Better Nation Fall Short (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006).

2. In my Civic Involvement Survey, 47 percent of residents in small non-metropolitan towns said that a lack of jobs was a “serious problem” in their community, significantly higher than the proportions giving this response in small towns in metropolitan areas (34 percent) or suburbs (25 percent), though the same as in central cities (47 percent).

3. The data are from the US Census Bureau, incorporated places, 2000, electronic data file. Nonurban towns refer to those classified in the census data as being outside the vicinity of a town of more than fifty thousand. It is true that small towns do not provide opportunities to pursue many kinds of occupations. The CEO of a Fortune 500 corporation may live in a city or suburb, but would be unlikely to live in a small town. With perhaps a few exceptions, that is also the case for most heads of state, Broadway stars, television anchorpersons, and Wall Street traders. Small towns, though, are more diverse than might be supposed. Our interviews included people who ran nuclear power plants, headed major statewide governmental agencies, served in elected and appointed positions in state and federal government, and earned six- and seven-figure incomes from businesses and investments. There were distinguished authors of books, newspaper columnists, college professors, executives of international firms, inventors, engineers, and professional athletes. They were less common than people who worked in offices, taught school, or labored in small businesses. But that is the case in cities as well.

4. Data from the General Social Surveys, electronic data files, conducted between 1998 and 2008, show that among all respondents raised in towns of under fifty thousand, only 16 percent were currently living in a small nonmetropolitan town of under twenty thousand people, 38 percent were living in towns of this size within a metropolitan area, and 47 percent were living in a city or suburb.

5. Seyla Benhabib, “Sexual Difference and Collective Identities: The New Global Constellation,” Signs 24 (1999): 345.

6. The fact that people in small towns tend on average to earn lower incomes than people do in cities (and work in less prestigious occupations) suggests the relevance of asking whether they are victims of discrimination, exploitation, opportunity hoarding, and related social structural factors that sociologists associate with inequality. See, for example, Douglas Massey, Categorically Unequal: The American Stratification System (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 2007); Erik Olin Wright and Joel Rogers, American Society: How It Actually Works (New York: W. W. Norton, 2010). Standard treatments of inequality generally do not consider differences between small towns and metropolitan areas to be important, presumably because residents voluntarily choose to live there. The exceptions are occasional discussions of new immigrants who work for low wages in small towns as well as manufacturing and agribusiness firms that locate in small towns to take advantage of an inexpensive, nonunionized labor force. See, for example, Donald D. Stull and Michael J. Broadway, Slaughterhouse Blues: The Meat and Poultry Industry in North America (San Francisco: Wadsworth, 2004). It is instructive to consider small towns in relation to the theoretical argument put forth by Charles Tilly (Durable Inequality [Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998]). Tilly contends that African Americans and women are categorical subordinate groups that employers can easily exploit. The rural/urban distinction might be considered a categorical distinction as well, especially in conjunction with pejorative stereotypes of rustic, ignorant country bumpkins. The difference, however, is that rural Americans were never subject to the same kind of legal definitions that legitimated discrimination against African Americans and women. The part of Tilly’s assertion that does apply to small-town residents is that employers engage in opportunity hoarding through structured information networks and emulation, and people who are in subordinate positions often are comfortable with the familiarity and friendships involved in those positions. The evidence I present here from interviews with residents of small towns emphasizes the importance of the local networks through which information about job opportunities flows and the ways in which limited horizons facilitate adaptation to available job opportunities.

7. Mark S. Granovetter, Getting a Job: A Study of Contacts and Careers (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1974); Mark S. Granovetter, “The Strength of Weak Ties,” American Journal of Sociology 78 (1973): 1360–80; Mark S. Granovetter, “The Strength of Weak Ties: A Network Theory Revisited,” Sociological Theory 1 (1983): 201–33.

8. On the concept of cognitive schemata, and discussions of the extent to which they are hardwired or culturally shaped, see William Brewer, “Schemata,” in The MIT Encyclopedia of the Cognitive Sciences, ed. Robert A. Wilson and Frank C. Keil (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001), 724–25; Roy D’Andrade, The Development of Cognitive Anthropology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995); Karen A. Cerulo, “Coming Together: New Taxonomies for the Analysis of Social Relations,” Sociological Inquiry 68 (1998): 398–425; Paul DiMaggio, “Culture and Cognition,” Annual Review of Sociology 23 (1997): 263–87; L. A. Hirschfeld and S. A. Gelman, eds., Mapping the Mind: Domain Specificity in Cognition and Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994). My discussion of cognitive schemata in the context of religion is also relevant. See Robert Wuthnow, “Cognition and Religion,” Sociology of Religion 68 (2007): 341–60.

9. For the most useful discussion of metaphors and vertical metaphors, see George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Metaphors We Live By (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980). For helpful yet brief discussions, see also Samuel Glucksberg, “Metaphor,” in The MIT Encyclopedia of Cognitive Science, ed. Robert A. Wilson and Frank C. Keil (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001), 532–34; Tim Rohrer, “The Cognitive Science of Metaphor from Philosophy to Neuroscience,” Theoria et Historia Scientarium 6 (2001): 27–42.

10. For a look at these narratives of trade-off, sacrifice, and gain in the context of immigrants’ stories about the American dream, see Wuthnow, American Mythos, 79–103.

11. Claudia Strauss, “What Makes Tony Run? Schemas as Motives Reconsidered,” in Human Motives and Cultural Models, ed. Roy G. D’Andrade and Claudia Strauss (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 197–224; Claudia Strauss, “Who Gets Ahead? Cognitive Responses to Heteroglossia in American Political Culture,” American Ethnologist 17 (1990): 312–28; Claudia Strauss, “Culture, Discourse, and Cognition: Forms of Belief in Some Rhode Island Working Men’s Talk about Success” (PhD diss., Harvard University, 1988).

12. Strauss, “What Makes Tony Run?”

13. I have in mind studies like Kathryn Edin and Laura Lein, Making Ends Meet: How Single Mothers Survive Welfare and Low-Wage Work (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1997); Katherine S. Newman, Falling from Grace: Downward Mobility in the Age of Affluence (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999); Katherine S. Newman and Victor Tan Chen, The Missing Class: Portraits of the Near Poor in America (Boston: Beacon, 2008).

14. Although there was media speculation at the time about the possible impact of the September 11 attacks on residential plans, it seems doubtful that the event prompted many people to flee to small towns. A study of New York City residents, for example, found little impact, but did suggest that fear of terrorism may have encouraged residents who already lived in smaller places to stay put. David Kay, Charles Geisler, and Nelson Bills, “Residential Preferences: What’s Terrorism Got to Do with It?” Rural Sociology 75 (2010): 426–54.

15. Although national data on precisely this point does not to my knowledge exist, the possibility of patrilocalistic tendencies in small towns is suggested by some of the available evidence. For example, results from the General Social Surveys, electronic data file, for married men and women interviewed between 1998 and 2008 show that among residents of nonmetropolitan communities of less than twenty thousand residents, women are slightly more likely than men (21 versus 18 percent) to have grown up in a city or suburb—meaning that they would not have been raised locally. The largest difference is that 28 percent of men compared with 19 percent of women grew up on farms. The data do not indicate whether people who grew up in small towns are presently living in the same small town or have moved. Because of land transfer patterns and multigenerational farming, the tendency toward patrilocalism may be stronger among farmers. For example, analysis of the 2000 US Census Five Percent Public Use Microsample, electronic data file, for married persons living in nonmetropolitan areas and identifying themselves as farmers, farm managers, or farmworkers, shows that among persons age 18 through 39, 51.1 percent of women were no longer residing in their birth state compared with 36.6 percent of men, and among persons age 40 through 75, 35.4 percent of women were no longer residing in their birth state compared with 24.3 percent of men. On land transfer itself, a small study that provided detail about the decisions of approximately three hundred farmers nearing retirement showed that 30.4 percent involved legal partnerships with sons, but none involved such partnerships with daughters; 54.1 percent shared management decisions with sons, but only 0.9 percent did so with daughters. Norah C. Keating and Brenda Munro, “Transferring the Family Farm: Process and Implications,” Family Relations 38 (1989): 215–19. On a larger scale that did not focus on rural communities, Walter D. Koenig (“Sex-Biased Dispersal in the Contemporary United States,” Ethology and Sociobiology 10 [1989]: 263–78) examined geographic mobility among more than twenty-eight hundred men and women using high school reunion booklets and a survey, and found that dispersal distances were greater among females than among males, but also possible variation attributable to location, education, occupation, and marital status.

16. For a brief discussion of some of these issues, see Ann R. Tickamyer and Debra A. Henderson, “Rural Women: New Roles for the New Century?” in Challenges for Rural America in the Twenty-First Century, ed. David L. Brown and Louis E. Swanson (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2003), 109–17. Analysis of US Census 2000 data for incorporated places shows that in nonurbanized towns of under twenty-five thousand population, 57.3 percent of married women were employed, and in these communities the annual income among females with earnings averaged $17,583 compared with $29,095 among males.

17. A contrasting example that does not involve farming or a woman giving up high career aspirations nevertheless illustrates the adjustments women may make in following husbands to small towns. This instance is a forty-year-old woman who lives in a town of two hundred because her husband wanted to return to his hometown when they started having children. They live in a mobile home next door to his parents and her husband’s brother, and besides their own children have custody of a niece whose mother died. The woman has worked at seven different jobs involving one-way commutes of up to forty-five minutes.

18. Although the academic literature has argued that having extended families nearby is generally a good thing, especially among the poor and for raising children (see, for example, Carol B. Stack, All Our Kin: Strategies for Survival in a Black Community [New York: Harper and Row, 1975]; for rural communities, see Valarie King and Glen H. Elder Jr., “American Children View Their Grandparents: Linked Lives across Three Rural Generations,” Journal of Marriage and Family 57 [1995]: 165–78; Valarie King and Glen H. Elder Jr., “The Legacy of Grandparenting: Childhood Experiences with Grandparents and Current Involvement with Grandchildren,” Journal of Marriage and the Family 59 [1997]: 848–59), the people we talked to were aware of the potential difficulties involved. A telling example was the story that a man who had grown up as an only child told us. When he married, his parents lived in a town an hour and a half away, which he felt was conveniently close and yet not too close. His mother, however, feared becoming an intrusive influence in her son and daughter-in-law’s lives, so his parents moved to a new location eight hours away to avoid that happening.

19. David B. Danbom, Born in the Country: A History of Rural America, 2nd ed. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006).

20. Ashok K. Mishra, James D. Johnson, and Mitchell J. Morehart, “Retirement and Succession Planning of Farm Households: Results from a National Survey” (paper presented at the National Public Policy Education Committee, Salt Lake City, September 21–23, 2003). For a comparative perspective, see Timothy W. Guinnane, “Intergenerational Transfers, Emigration, and the Rural Irish Household System,” Explorations in Economic History 29 (1992): 456–76. Recent econometric analyses of wage differentials suggest substantial nonpecuniary benefits from farming. See Nigel Key and Michael J. Roberts, “Nonpecuniary Benefits to Farming: Implications for Supply Response to Decoupled Payments,” American Journal of Agricultural Economics 91 (2009): 1–18.

21. For a discussion of the ethic of family continuity and land that has been inherited by siblings and cousins being farmed by relatives, see John Hutson, “Fathers and Sons: Family Farms, Family Businesses, and the Farming Industry,” Sociology 21 (1987): 215–29. For an examination of the factors that influence farm succession, such as operator’s education, household wealth, and farm size, see Ashok K. Mishra, Hisham S. El-Osta, and James D. Johnson, “Succession in Family Farm Business: Empirical Evidence from the U.S. Farm Sector” (paper presented at the annual meeting of the Agricultural and Applied Economics Association, Denver, August 1–4, 2004).

22. The data shown in the figure were calculated from information available online from the US Bureau of Economic Analysis and organized as SAS files by John Blodgett at the Missouri Census Data Center. The data were calculated from 674 counties, selected from 1970 county data in which comparisons could be made between the overall value of personal income in the county and the value of agricultural products sold in the county. Those counties include 3,500 nonurban towns with fewer than 25,000 residents in 1980. Mean net farm income per county without adjustments for inflation or number of farmers increased from $6,641,000 in 1969 to $27,079,000 in 2009—the most recent data available at the time the analysis was done. The Consumer Price Index set at 1.0 in 1969 increased to 5.845 in 2009. The net farm income per county adjusted for the change in the Consumer Price Index thus fell from $6,641,000 in 1969 to $4,632,334 in 2009, and when further adjusted by the declining number of farmers, held fairly constant at $6,675 per farmer in 1969 until $6,390 in 2001, and peaked at $14,781 in 1973 and $12,176 in 2008.

23. John A. Schnittker, “The 1972–73 Food Price Spiral,” Brookings Papers on Economic Activity 4 (1973): 498–507; Shelby W. Herman, “Farm Income in 1973 and Outlook for 1974,” Survey of Current Business (September 1974): 11–13.

24. These data are for the 667 counties in which the value of agricultural products compared with the overall value of personal income was highest in data from 1970.

25. Ramona Marotz-Baden and Deane Cowan, “Mothers-in-law and Daughters-in-law: The Effects of Proximity on Conflict and Stress,” Family Relations 36 (1987): 385–90; Ramona Marotz-Baden and Claudia Mattheis, “Daughters-in-law and Stress in Two-Generation Farm Families,” Family Relations 43 (1994): 132–37; Fiona Gill, “Moving to the ‘Big’ House: Power and Accommodation in Inter-generational Farming Families,” Rural Society 18 (2008): 83–94.

26. Rich Allen and Ginger Harris, “What We Know about the Demographics of U.S. Farm Operators,” Agricultural Outlook Forum (February 25, 2005), http://www.agcensus.usda.gov/Publications/2002/Other_Analysis/.

27. Median age and percentage over age sixty as reported here are from my analysis of data from the US Decennial Census in 1950 and 2000 for males age eighteen and over who listed their occupation as farmer (owner or tenant). The data are from the Public Use One Percent Microsamples, electronic data files, courtesy of Steven Ruggles, Matthew Sobek, Trent Alexander, Catherine A. Fitch, Ronald Goeken, Patricia Kelly Hall, Miriam King, and Chad Ronnander, Integrated Public Use Microdata Series: Version 4.0 [machine-readable database] (Minneapolis: Minnesota Population Center, 2008). For a discussion of the aging of farm operators, see J. L. Harlin, “The Aging Family Farm: Estate/Succession Planning for Farmers,” Agricultural Finance 34 (1992): 38–39; Ayal Kimhi and Ramon Lopez, “A Note on Farmers’ Retirement and Succession Considerations: Evidence from a Household Survey,” Journal of Agricultural Economics 50 (1999): 154–62; Keating and Munro, “Transferring the Family Farm.” Estimates compiled by the US Department of Agriculture showed that 648,297 of the nation’s 2,131,007 farms (30 percent) in 2009 were operated by persons sixty-five years or older; 74 percent of these farms were full-owner operated, 23 percent were part-owner operated, and 3 percent were operated by tenants. See Agricultural Resource Management Survey, US Department of Agriculture, November 2010, http://www.ers.usda.gov.

6. LEADERSHIP: EARNING RESPECT, IMPROVING THE COMMUNITY

1. For examples of the formal leadership and community planning literature, see Kristina Ford, James Lopach, and Dennis O’Donnell, Planning in Small Town America: Observations, Sketches, and a Reform Proposal (Chicago: American Planning Association, 1990); John Nalbandian, Professionalism in Local Government (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1991).

2. Community Involvement Survey, electronic data file. The percentages of people who said they would admire persons involved in these ways were higher in small nonmetropolitan towns than in other communities. Specifically, the percentage of people who said they would admire “a lot” a person who helps the poor was 9 and 5 points higher, respectively, than among respondents in suburbs and central cities; a person who gets things organized was 3 and 13 points higher, respectively; and a person who volunteers was 8 and 11 points higher, respectively.

3. Factors contributing to the decline of membership and participation in community organizations include porous community and institutional boundaries, specialized interest organizations that facilitate short-term and occasional involvement, postponed marriage and child rearing, and declining organizational resources in lower-income urban communities. See Robert D. Putnam, Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2000); Robert Wuthnow, Loose Connections: Joining Together in America’s Fragmented Communities (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998); Robert Wuthnow, “Der Wandel des Sozialkapitals in den USA,” in Gesellschaft und Gemeinsinn: Sozialkapital im internationalen Vergleich, ed. Robert D. Putnam (Gütersloh, Germany: Verlag Bertelsmann Stiftung, 2001), 655–749.

4. These data were provided by the National Center for Charitable Statistics at the Urban Institute as an electronic data file. The zip code population data are from the 2000 US Census, which corresponded most closely to the zip code designations for associations. The nonprofit associations data underestimate the total number of such organizations because religious organizations are not required to file with the Internal Revenue Service, although those that have done so voluntarily or that have been chartered as 501(c)3 tax-exempt entities are included.

5. The data in the figure are from the Civic Involvement Survey. They are the odds ratios for holding membership in each kind of organization among residents of small nonmetropolitan towns with residents of suburbs as the comparison group, and control for residence in small metropolitan towns or central cities, gender, race, ethnicity, level of education, age, and whether or not the respondent has children living in the household.

6. Mr. Tanka’s community is one of ninety-six incorporated towns in the contiguous United States in which 30 percent or more of the population is Native American; the average population of these communities is approximately one thousand.

7. An attorney we interviewed made an important observation about squabbles in small towns. Based on the many civil disputes he had litigated, he thought conflicts between neighbors were often avoided because people knew they had to coexist in a small community for a long time and thus did not voice their grievances unless the problem became acute. He also thought that it was an advantage that small towns have plenty of space between houses and big yards. “A nice wide-open stretch between us [helps] because I’m not stepping on your toes, I’m not looking in your windows, I’m not smelling your funny-smelling food when you cook it. It is a function of just having fewer people per square mile and not having as many people stepping on your toes.” This observation squared with the fact that most of the conflicts public officials talked about involved collective goods, such as schools and law enforcement, which could not be so easily resolved.

8. For a discussion of the so-called broken windows theory of social disorder, see Robert J. Sampson and Stephen W. Raudenbush, Disorder in Urban Neighborhoods: Does It Lead to Crime? (Washington, DC: US Department of Justice, National Institute of Justice, 2001); Robert J. Sampson and Stephen W. Raudenbush, “Seeing Disorder: Neighborhood Stigma and the Social Construction of ‘Broken Windows,’ ” Social Psychology Quarterly 67 (2004): 319–42.

9. In some of the communities we studied, debates about historic preservation had emerged especially in conjunction with passing local ordinances that put the community in conformity with state preservation laws, for example, that required special approvals to modify any building more than fifty years old or that qualified certain buildings for state preservation funds.

10. Not to belabor the point, but the process of historical preservation, which appears from our interviews to be widespread in small towns, is always a matter of nudging aspects of past lived experience into forms that can be consumed easily by visitors and new residents. This process has been perceptively described in other contexts. On Jewish neighborhoods, see Beth S. Wenger, History Lessons: The Creation of American Jewish Heritage (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010). On sections of New York City, see Hasia R. Diner, Jeffrey Shandler, and Beth S. Wenger, eds., Remembering the Lower East Side: American Jewish Reflections (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000). For mission parishes in the San Antonia area, see Thomas S. Bremer, Blessed with Tourists: The Borderlands of Religion and Tourism in San Antonio (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003).

11. David Obstfeld, “Social Networks, the Tertius Iungens Orientation, and Involvement in Innovation,” Administrative Science Quarterly 50 (2005): 100–130; Gautam Ahuja, “Collaboration Networks, Structural Holes, and Innovation: A Longitudinal Study,” Administrative Science Quarterly 45 (2000): 425–55; Simon Rodan and Charles Galunic, “More than Network Structure: How Knowledge Heterogeneity Influences Managerial Performance and Innovativeness,” Strategic Management Journal 25 (2004): 541–62; Ronald S. Burt, “Structural Holes and Good Ideas,” American Journal of Sociology 110 (2004): 349–99; David Strang and Sarah A. Soule, “Diffusion in Organizations and Social Movements: From Hybrid Corn to Poison Pills,” Annual Review of Sociology 24 (1998): 265–90.

12. An attempt to investigate the extent of closed and open networks was included in the 1985 General Social Survey, in which 1,517 nationally representative adults were asked, “Some people have friends who mostly know one another. Other people have friends who don’t know one another. Would you say that all of your friends know one another, most of your friends know one another, only a few of your friends know one another, or none of your friends know one another?” Only 12 percent of respondents living in towns of 2,500 to 10,000 people selected the most closed option by indicating that all their friends knew each other, the same percentage as for the whole sample and smaller than the 16 percent of residents of large cities (with populations greater than 250,000) who gave the same response. Combining those who said all or most of their friends knew each other, the proportion (71 percent) was higher in small towns than in large cities (54 percent), but still indicated that most residents of small towns had at least a few friends who did not know each other. Strong and weak ties with people outside the community were abundantly evident in our interviews, in which people talked about relatives and friends who lived elsewhere, acquaintances from having lived elsewhere themselves, business contacts, phone calls, and emails.

13. For a useful review showing mixed results from network studies and the need to consider additional contextual factors, see Alejandro Portes, “Social Capital: Its Origins and Applications in Modern Sociology,” Annual Review of Sociology 24 (1998): 1–24. On the evident variability of network structure effects in rural villages, although in a different national setting, see Barbara Entwisle, Katherine Faust, Ronald R. Rindfuss, and Toshiko Kaneda, “Networks and Contexts: Variation in the Structure of Social Ties,” American Journal of Sociology 112 (2007): 1495–533. For a discussion of regional programs that encourage cooperation and the exchange of ideas among communities in US small towns, see Ted K. Bradshaw, “Multicommunity Networks: A Rural Transition,” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 529 (1993): 164–75. The farmer quoted was referring to the best-selling book by Thomas L. Friedman, The World Is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-First Century (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2005).

14. An interesting example of innovation via the Internet is the development of eBay markets for used farm machinery. See Florian Diekmann, Brian E. Roe, and Marvin T. Batte, “Tractors on eBay: Differences between Internet and In-Person Auctions,” American Journal of Agricultural Economics 90 (2008): 306–20.

15. One thing that came through repeatedly in our interviews was the importance of the local newspaper. In towns that had one, residents frequently referred to its role in publicizing local events as well as contributing to the community’s identity and sense of community mindedness. In other towns, residents complained that the newspaper had gone out of business or been purchased by a large media chain that no longer did a good job of featuring local events. Several interviewees described successful efforts by local residents to develop blog sites or print community newsletters.

16. The data in the figure are from the 2008 population estimates provided by the US Census Bureau and computed by merging the data for incorporated places with the data for counties. An interesting simulation study of intertown networks (based on commuting in Italy) suggests that large hub towns are likely to be linked to many satellite towns that are disconnected from each other, while smaller towns may have fewer neighboring towns but are still connected to each other. See Andrea DeMontis, Alessandro Chessa, Michele Campagna, Simone Caschili, and Giancarlo Deplano, “Modeling Commuting Systems through a Complex Network Analysis: A Study of the Italian Islands of Sardinia and Sicily,” Journal of Transport and Land Use 2 (2010): 39–55.

17. The results shown in the figure are from nearest-neighbor analysis in which latitude and longitude are used as the predictor variables, using Euclidean distances and with one iteration to identify the nearest town, and the partition variable selecting for the nearest town that had a population in 1980 of at least twenty-five hundred.

18. Nearest-neighbor analysis was used to compute the predicted value for mean population in 1980 of towns’ five geographically closest towns, with algorithm parameters set for Euclidean distances and five iterations.

19. US Department of Health and Human Services, Results from the 2004 National Survey on Drug Use and Health: National Findings (Washington, DC: Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, Office of Applied Studies, 2004). This survey showed that illicit drug use was still lower in nonmetropolitan areas than in metropolitan ones; the proportion of persons age twelve and older who had used illicit drugs in the past month were 4.6 percent in rural nonmetropolitan areas, 5.6 percent in less urbanized nonmetropolitan areas, 8.5 percent in small metropolitan areas, and 8.1 percent in large metropolitan areas (ibid., figure 2.7, 21). National Drug Enforcement Administration figures for methamphetamine seizures showed a steady increase from 198 kilograms in 1987 to 2,161 kilograms in 2005, after which the amount declined to 1,703 kilograms in 2009. The number of seizures in 2009 varied widely among states, from only one or two in Maine and Wisconsin to more than a thousand in Missouri and Indiana.

20. Nick Reding, Methland: The Death and Life of an American Small Town (New York: Bloomsbury, 2009).

21. Walter Kirn, “Wasted Land,” New York Times, July 1, 2009.

22. For annual statistics on crime and law enforcement for Oelwein, and with comparisons for Iowa and the nation, see http://www.city-data.com/crime/crime-Oelwein-Iowa.html.

23. Several of our interviewees blamed local law enforcement officers for lax supervision of drug and alcohol problems, but it was more common for references to law enforcement to mention the difficulties involved in paying for adequate coverage in small towns and rural counties. There was also a wide range of opinion about the merits of law enforcement. At one extreme, residents favored harsher punishment, while at the other end of the spectrum, some residents entertained ideas about legalizing drugs.

24. Robert Wuthnow, Remaking the Heartland: Middle America since the 1950s (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2011). For a look at colleges that focuses on the distinctive qualities of college towns, but deals more with cities than with small towns, see also Blake Gumprecht, “The American College Town,” Geographical Review 93 (2003): 51–80. The advantages for small towns of having a college include a higher proportion of well-educated residents, an ability to educate local youths and attract youths who stay in the area, leadership experience gained through college administration, and the cultural events provided by the college. For an examination of the role of county seats in an earlier period, see Glenn V. Fuguitt, “County Seat Status as a Factor in Small Town Growth and Decline,” Social Forces 44 (1965): 245–51. For an exploration of the effects of highways and highway expansion on population trends in rural areas, see Craig R. Humphrey and Ralph R. Sell, “The Impact of Controlled Access Highways on Population Growth in Nonmetropolitan Communities, 1940–1970,” Rural Sociology 40 (1975): 332–43; Daniel T. Lichter and Glenn V. Fuguitt, “Demographic Response to Transportation Innovation: The Case of the Interstate Highway,” Social Forces 59 (1980): 492–512; Guangqing Chi, “The Impacts of Highway Expansion on Population Change: An Integrated Spatial Approach,” Rural Sociology 75 (2010): 58–89.

25. For similar observations, based on interviews conducted in eighteen rural towns, in which qualities associated with good leadership included an emphasis on community pride, a participatory approach to community decision making, a realistic appraisal of future opportunities, and awareness of competitive positioning, see Milan Wall, “Factors in Rural Community Survival: Review of Insights from Thriving Small Towns,” Great Plains Research 9 (1999): 115–35. See also Milan Wall, “Clues to Rural Community Survival,” Heartland Center for Leadership Development, 2010.

7. HABITS OF FAITH: THE SOCIAL ROLE OF SMALL-TOWN CONGREGATIONS

1. These data were collected by InfoGroup, http://www.socialexplorer.com. Another study conducted in 2000 yielded similar results. For example, it identified 3,727 Jewish congregations nationwide, but only 19 were located in counties with populations of fewer than twenty-five thousand people. The same study identified 1,209 mosques nationwide, but only 7 were in counties with populations of fewer than twenty-five thousand people. See Glenmary Research Center, electronic data file. Congregation leaders reported information voluntarily, which means that some congregations may have been missed. For valuable historical information, see Lee Shai Weissbach, Jewish Life in Small-Town America: A History (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2005). Weissbach examines the lives of the minority of the US Jewish population between the 1870s and 1950s who did not live in cities, and argues that accommodation and tolerance between Christians and Jews was often present in these communities. Most of the “small towns” included in the study (such as Fresno, California; Colorado Springs, Colorado; Orlando, Florida; Evanston, Illinois; and Lansing, Michigan) already had populations of more than twenty-five thousand people by 1920. The accommodation and tolerance that Weissbach observes is consistent with studies showing that tolerance, intergroup trust, and lower levels of negative stereotyping toward minority religious and ethnic groups is generally lower in communities where the proportionate representation of those groups is lower, and thus less likely to be regarded by the majority population as a threat. See, for example, Charles Y. Glock, Robert Wuthnow, Jane Allyn Piliavin, and Metta Spencer, Adolescent Prejudice (New York: Harper and Row, 1975); Robert D. Putnam, “E Pluribus Unum: Diversity and Community in the Twenty-First Century,” Scandinavian Political Studies 30 (2007): 137–74. The fact that most synagogues and mosques are located in cities does not mean that formal interaction with churches and church members takes place. For a discussion of research on this, see Robert Wuthnow, America and the Challenges of Religious Diversity (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005). Among our interviews here, however, residents of large cities notably pointed out the presence of Jews and Muslims in their communities as an aspect of diversity that they appreciated, if only from a distance.

2. Robert Wuthnow and Kevin Christiano, “The Effect of Residential Migration on Church Attendance in the United States,” in The Religious Dimension: New Directions in Quantitative Research, ed. Robert Wuthnow (New York: Academic Press, 1979), 259–76.

3. Phillip Connor, “Increase or Decrease? The Impact of the International Migratory Event on Immigrant Religious Participation,” Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 47 (2008): 243–57; Phillip Connor, “International Migration and Religious Participation: The Mediating Impact of Individual and Contextual Effects,” Sociological Forum 24 (2009): 779–803.

4. For the soup kitchen study, see Courtney Bender, Heaven’s Kitchen: Living Religion at God’s Love We Deliver (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003). For the church parking lot study, see Penny Long Marler and C. Kirk Hadaway, “Testing the Attendance Gap in a Conservative Church,” Sociology of Religion 60 (1999): 175–86. For additional discussions, see C. Kirk Hadaway, Penny Long Marler, and Mark Chaves, “What the Polls Don’t Show: A Closer Look at U.S. Church Attendance,” American Sociological Review 58 (1993): 741–52; Paul J. Olson, “Any Given Sunday: Weekly Church Attendance in a Midwestern City,” Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 47 (2008): 443–61.

5. Data on churches and church adherence were collected in 2000 by the Glenmary Research Center, electronic data file, http://thearda.com. Those data permitted the tabulation of the number of congregations by population of county. Data were also collected in 2009 by InfoGroup, electronic data file, http://www.social explorer.com. The population figures provided by each organization are from the 2000 decennial census and 2007 population estimates, respectively. From the Glenmary data, which appears to provide a somewhat more complete count of churches among all denominations, counties with fewer than 5,000 people have a median number of 11 churches, or 1 for every 268 people. That number changes to 1 for every 322 people in counties with populations of 5,000 to 10,000, 1 for every 404 people in counties of 10,000 to 20,000, 1 for every 537 people in counties of 20,000 to 50,000, and 1 for every 895 people in counties of 50,000 or more. The rates shown in the figure are standardized as the number of churches per 1,000 inhabitants. The data are for 3,139 counties.

6. The adherence data were collected in 2000 by the Glenmary Research Center, and the membership data were collected in 2009 by InfoGroup.

7. On the significance of the public expression of religion, including some observations about congregations’ visibility in the community, see Robert Wuthnow, Producing the Sacred: An Essay on Public Religion (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1994). For some information from interviewees about the significance of religious buildings, Robert Wuthnow, Growing Up Religious: Christians and Jews and Their Journeys of Faith (Boston: Beacon, 1999), 69–84. Although relatively little attention has been given to the public impact of religious buildings, compared with evidence about church attendance or the political influence of religious groups, in discussions of secularization, this would seem to be a critical topic deserving further investigation, especially as larger proportions of the population live in urban places where the number of churches per capita is lower than in small towns. For some broader observations about the visual impact of religion, see David Morgan and Sally M. Promey, The Visual Culture of American Religions (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001). For a book that explores the theological significance of sacred places, see Robert M. Hamma, Landscapes of the Soul: A Spirituality of Place (Notre Dame, IN: Ave Maria Press, 1999).

8. The results summarized in the figure are from a binary logistic regression analysis of cumulative data collected in General Social Surveys between 1972 and 2008 (N = 52,344). The dependent variable is “attend,” coded as “1” for respondents who said they attend religious services nearly every week, every week, or more than once a week. Residence in a small town refers to respondents who lived in a nonmetropolitan community of fewer than twenty thousand people. Control variables in the model were year of the survey, respondent’s age, respondent’s affiliation as an evangelical Protestant, Catholic, Other, or Nonaffiliated (with mainline Protestant as the reference category), respondent’s region as the South, Midwest, or West (with the Northeast as the reference category), gender, and race. The education variable was coded from years of education, and consisted of dummy variables for twelve years of primary and secondary education, one to three years of higher education, or four or more years of higher education (with fewer than twelve years as the reference category), and interaction terms for the interaction of small town and high school graduate, small town and some college, and small town and college graduate. In models without the interaction terms, the effects of all control variables are significant at the .001 level and the effect of small town residence is significant at that level with a modest odds ratio of 1.146. With the interaction terms in the model, the interaction terms account for the binary effect of small town residence, the interaction between small town and high school graduate is not significant, and the interaction terms for small town and some college as well as small town and college graduate are both significant. The figure shows the odds of attending religious services regularly for each level of education among small-town residents and among urban residents compared with the odds of attending religious services regularly among those who have not graduated from high school, taking into account all the control variables and interaction effects. A substantive interpretation of the results is that the odds of small-town residents who have graduated from college attending church weekly are approximately three times greater than the odds among smalltown residents who have not graduated from high school, compared with a ratio of approximately two among residents in urban areas.

9. General Social Surveys, electronic data files. These results are from comparisons between residents living in nonmetropolitan towns of fewer than twenty thousand people and all respondents in the nationally representative surveys; surveys conducted from 2000 to 2008. Small towns differ from larger places in terms of demographic factors that affect religious service attendance. For example, small towns are disproportionally located in the South and Midwest, where attendance rates are higher; have larger proportions of elderly residents, who attend more often than younger people; but have a lower proportion of college residents, who attend more frequently than people with less education. These demographic factors largely cancel one another. For instance, the odds ratio of weekly church attendance regressed on a binary variable comparing small and larger towns is 1.235; it is 1.236 when controlling for region (South), education (college graduate), age (sixty-five and older), and gender. There is, of course, a long tradition in the social sciences suggesting that religion is more important in rural places than in urban ones because of closeness of nature, greater exposure to “acts of God,” and the like, but there seems to be little reason to think these presumed differences explain much about religion in contemporary small towns. See Kevin D. Breault, “New Evidence on Religious Pluralism, Urbanism, and Religious Participation,” American Sociological Review 54 (1989): 1048–53; Morgan Luck, “The Miracle of the Religious Divide: An Additional Argument for the Purported Distinction between Rural and Urban Religiosity,” in Where the Crows Fly Backwards: Notions of Rural Identity, ed. Nancy Blacklow and Troy Whitford (Mount Gravatt, Queensland: Post Pressed, 2010), 59–65. Nor do blanket comparisons of rural and urban areas shed light on local variations resulting from differences in ethnic settlement and denominational practices. See Janel M. Curry, “Community Worldview and Rural Systems: A Study of Five Communities in Iowa,” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 90 (2000): 693–712.

10. These examples point to what Alejandro Portes (“Social Capital: Its Origins and Applications in Modern Sociology,” Annual Review of Sociology 24 [1998]: 1–24) terms “enforceable trust.” Obligations, Portes writes, “are enforceable, not through recourse to law or violence but through the power of the community” (ibid., 9). Portes suggests that enforceable trust is present, for example, when a student receives a loan because their coethnic group can be counted on to ensure that the loan is repaid or a banker loans money to a member of the community with the same expectation that the community will bring sanctions to bear if the person does not repay the loan. Similarly, church members in a small town can be trusted by fellow members to attend services, help with cleanup days, and so on, because those fellow members are likely to see that person in the community even if the person considers not participating in church activities.

11. These results are from the Global Issues Survey, a nationally representative survey of active church members, conducted under my direction in 2005. See Robert Wuthnow, Boundless Faith: The Global Outreach of American Churches (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009). In my survey, 411 respondents lived outside a census-defined MSA, and said their church was located in a small town or rural area, while 1,820 respondents lived in an MSA. Respectively, 46 and 17 percent of the small town and metropolitan churchgoers said they attended congregations of fewer than two hundred members, while 8 and 35 percent, respectively, attended congregations larger than a thousand. Nationally, 34 percent of members of congregations of fewer than two hundred said more than ten of their close friends belonged to their congregation, while that figure rose to 40 percent among members of congregations of a thousand or more. A binary logistic regression analysis of the data shows that the odds of having more than ten friends in one’s congregation are 1.376 greater among residents who attend congregations in small rural towns than among residents who live in MSAs, controlling for age, gender, marital status, race, education, frequency of attendance, religious tradition, and congregation size.

12. Due to data limitations, there is no ideal way in which to estimate average church attendance by size and location of town, at least not with evidence from surveys with respectable response rates. Thus, the data in the figure were computed as follows: information about frequency of attendance at religious services was drawn from two large nationally representative surveys conducted in 2006 and 2008, which yielded more than sixty thousand respondents when merged (the reported response rate was 47 percent among those initially included in the random sample); because respondents were identified at the county level (which is rare in surveys), it was possible to compute an average weekly church attendance score for each county in the United States by aggregating the responses of the respondents in each county; these scores were then merged with the town-level data, yielding results that indicate the average weekly church attendance rate for the county in which each town is located. For information about the data, see Stephen Ansolabehere, Cooperative Congressional Election Study, 2006: Common Content, (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University, 2010); Stephen Ansolabehere, Cooperative Congressional Election Study, 2008: Common Content (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University, 2010). For the electronic data files, see http://projects.iq.harvard.edu/cces.

13. Michael Mayerfeld Bell, Childerley: Nature and Morality in a Country Village (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994).

14. As an example of the community-caring activities of small-town churches, focusing on Council Grove, Kansas, with a population of twenty-two hundred, see Ram A. Cnaan, The Invisible Caring Hand: American Congregations and the Provision of Welfare (New York: New York University Press, 2002), 139–55.

15. A longtime member of the Lutheran Church in a town of thirteen hundred, for example, explained that there were good relationships between the Lutherans and Methodists, but said it was different with new evangelical churches in her town and several neighboring communities. “They build a building, and they draw their members from the congregations that have been solid in the communities for years and years. You’re seeing this all over with more not-the-traditional religions.” Somewhat begrudgingly, she added, “It’s OK if that’s what they want.” But she also felt that church membership and attendance should not be “like rush week for a fraternity or sorority.”

16. General Social Surveys, electronic data files; results nationally and for residents living in nonmetropolitan towns of fewer than twenty thousand people; surveys conducted between 1972 and 1978 as well as between 2000 and 2008. Aggregating the surveys yielded an N of 1,367 residents of small towns for the earlier period and 1,796 for the more recent period. Besides the percentages for evangelical and mainline Protestants, Catholics, and historically black denominations, fewer than 1 percent in each period were Jewish, 2 and 5 percent in the respective periods listed other faiths, and 3 and 13 percent, respectively, said they were nonaffiliated.

17. The county-level data collected by InfoGroup in 2009 show that evangelical Protestants make up 37 percent of all church members in counties with fewer than five thousand residents, 45 percent in counties with five to ten thousand residents, 51 percent in counties of ten to twenty-five thousand, 48 percent in counties of twenty-five to fifty thousand, and 32 percent in counties of fifty thousand or more; respectively, mainline Protestants account for 33, 28, 23, 22, and 17 percent; and Catholics account for 20, 14, 12, 16, and 30 percent.

18. Another factor that facilitated the churches’ service activities in some of the smaller communities we studied was their location. Unlike churches located in upscale metropolitan suburbs that often are geographically isolated from low-income inner-city neighborhoods, small-town churches were frequently located near the center of the community, and were in close proximity to low-income housing or could operate latchkey programs because of being near the school. Some of the larger communities had difficulty because transportation was lacking, but school buses, van service for the disabled and elderly paid through state programs, and volunteer drivers sometimes solved these problems.

19. Penny Edgell Becker, Congregations in Conflict: Cultural Models of Local Religious Life (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999); Penny Edgell, Religion and Family in a Changing Society (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006).

20. Garrison Keillor, A Prairie Home Companion, radio program, November 7, 2009.

21. National Congregations Study, designed by Mark Chaves and conducted among 1,234 congregations in 1998, electronic data file. The comparisons refer to the census tract in which the congregation was located. For further information on the study, see Mark Chaves, Congregations in America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004).

22. This was not an isolated event. As denominations discussed policies about gay and lesbian ordination and acceptance into membership, congregations found themselves divided. In a town of nine hundred, the sixty-member United Church of Christ, for example, lost twenty of its members when the majority of the congregation voted to maintain its affiliation with the denomination after the denomination voted to extend ordination and membership to gays and lesbians. The important aspect of the controversy was that nearly everyone thought the conflict could have been avoided, and indeed wished it had been, because they were all friends and neighbors who regularly saw one another in the small town. The pastor recalled, “I really think everybody understood that we were not bound to perform commitment ceremonies or anything unless our congregation decided it wanted to.” He also encouraged members to communicate with denominational officials and remains “baffled” that they did not. In retrospect, the people who left were increasingly dissatisfied with what they saw as “liberal” tendencies in the denomination over a period of years.

23. R. Stephen Warner, A Church of Our Own: Disestablishment and Diversity in American Religion (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2005).

24. These results are from my Global Issues Survey, conducted in 2005. Perspective on the responses given by active churchgoers in small nonmetropolitan areas can be gained by comparing them with the respondents of subjects interviewed in MSAs. The largest differences were in the proportions of respondents who said that at least a few of their fellow congregation members were immigrants (50 and 80 percent, respectively) and that a lot of their fellow congregants were immigrants (3 and 10 percent, respectively). Other items generally showed similarities: the congregation was believed to emphasize international ministry a lot (35 and 38 percent), the congregation had a missions committee (35 and 40 percent), the congregation sent a group abroad on a short-term mission trip (39 and 45 percent), the congregation hosted a guest speaker from another country (40 and 51 percent), the congregation had a hunger relief offering in the past year (74 and 76 percent), and it helped sponsor one or more foreign missionaries (77 and 73 percent). See also Wuthnow, Boundless Faith.

25. Although the literature on small town and rural churches is relatively sparse, for several recent volumes of potential interest to clergy and lay leaders, see Lawrence W. Farris, Dynamics of Small Town Ministry (Herndon, VA: Alban Institute, 2000); Shannon Jung, ed., Rural Ministry: The Shape of the Renewal to Come (Nashville: Abington, 1998); Peter G. Bush and H. Christine O’Reilly, Where 20 or 30 Are Gathered: Leading Worship in the Small Church (Herndon, VA: Alban Institute, 2006); papers from the Missouri Rural Churches Project at the Missouri School of Religion (http://www.msr-crm.org).

26. In Father Malone’s diocese, more clustering was expected because the average age of priests was sixty-seven and a quarter were scheduled to retire in five years. Meanwhile, the diocese was making greater use of deacons and immigrant priests. On rural Catholic practices, see also Miriam Brown, ed., Sustaining Heart in the Heartland: Exploring Rural Spirituality (Mahwah, NJ: Paulist Press, 2005).

27. The data shown in the figure are from the previously cited Glenmary data collected nationally in 2000 and comparable data collected in 1980 (the 2009 InfoGroup data are less comparable), electronic data files courtesy of the Association of Religion Data Archives. The data presented here are for nonmetropolitan counties only, of which there were 2,994 with religion data in 1980 and 3,022 with religion data in 2000. During these two decades, 2,001 counties experienced no population loss, and the mean number of adherents increased from 31,082 to 40,242 and the mean number of churches increased from 74.4 to 87.2; 832 counties experienced a total population decline of less than 20 percent, or 1 percent per year, and the mean number of adherents decreased from 24,405 to 21,680 while the number of churches decreased from 61.2 to 60.7; 161 counties experienced a population decline of more than 20 percent, the mean number of adherents declined from 6,314 to 4,847, and the number of churches declined from 25.5 to 23.1. Further analysis comparing smaller and larger counties, using the US Department of Agriculture definition of county population loss, yielded similar results.

28. The results described here are from multiple regression analysis of the 1980 and 2000 religion data with 2,994 nonmetropolitan counties as the unit of analysis. Using the total number of churches per county in 1980 as the dependent variable and with the total county population in 1980 included in the model, the unstandardized regression coefficient for the number of towns with less than twenty-five thousand population each per county is 2.778 and the standardized coefficient is 0.183, significant at or beyond the 0.001 level of probability. Using the total number of churches per county in 2000 as the dependent variable, and with the total county population in 1980 and total number of churches in 1980 included in the model, the unstandardized regression coefficient for the number of towns with less than twenty-five thousand population is –.1.163 and the standardized coefficient is –0.060, significant at or beyond the 0.001 level of probability.

29. Without mentioning the Religious Right specifically, a number of other church members, whose views on social issues ranged from far Left to far Right, said they deplored the divisiveness surrounding moral and political issues. It was the distortion, lies, and hyperbole that especially bothered them along with the seeming inability of people on either side to have calm reasoned discussion.

30. Or as a woman in another small town that included several Jewish and Muslim families observed, “It gets a little creepy sometimes,” referring to how closely integrated Christian practices were with school activities.

31. Ronald K. Crandall, Turnaround Strategies for the Small Church (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1995).

32. Ronald K. Crandall, Turnaround and Beyond: A Hopeful Future for the Small Membership Church (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 2008). See also Ed Stetzer and Mike Dodson, Comeback Churches: How 300 Churches Turned Around and Yours Can, Too (Nashville: B&H Books, 2007).

8. CONTENTIOUS ISSUES: THE MORAL SENTIMENTS OF COMMUNITY LIFE

1. For one of the most thoughtful discussions of the tensions between progressives and conservatives, see James Davison Hunter, Culture Wars: The Struggle to Define America (New York: Basic Books, 1991). See also James Davison Hunter and Alan Wolfe, Is There a Culture War? A Dialogue on Values and American Life (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press, 2006).

2. The data in the figure are drawn from the 2006 Common Congressional Election Study in which a nationally representative sample of 36,337 adults age eighteen and over participated, of whom 12,610 said the opinion that best agreed with their view was either that “by law, abortion should never be permitted” or “the law should permit abortion only in case of rape, incest, or when the woman’s life is in danger” (and thus did not opt for the statement that read “the law should permit abortion for reasons other than rape, incest, or danger to the woman’s life, but only after the need for the abortion has been clearly established” or “by law, a woman should always be able to obtain an abortion as a matter of personal choice”). The odds ratios shown are from logistic regression in which gender, race, living in the South, being age sixty or over or younger than age thirty, and being a college graduate were included, and the median size of towns in the county in which each respondent lived and whether that county was in an MSA or not were introduced, with median population in 2010 of towns between 25,000 and 49,999 as the excluded comparison category.

3. The results shown in the figure are from General Social Surveys, electronic data files, conducted between 1998 and 2008, including approximately 8,850 randomly selected respondents representative of the noninstitutional, English-speaking population of the United States age eighteen and over. The figure shows the odds ratios for respondents living in nonmetropolitan towns of fewer than 20,000 people compared with respondents living in larger metropolitan communities, based on binary logistic regression models in which controls were included for age, sex, race, region, and level of education.

4. This argument is not shared by all historians of witch hunts in colonial America, but was advanced notably by sociologist Kai T. Erikson (Wayward Puritans: A Study in the Sociology of Deviance [New York: John Wiley and Sons, 1969]).

5. Joseph Gusfield, Symbolic Crusade: Status Politics and the American Temperance Movement, rev. ed. (New York: Greenwood Press); Daniel Okrent, Last Call: The Rise and Fall of Prohibition (New York: Scribner, 2010).

6. James Davison Hunter, Before the Shooting Begins: Searching for Democracy in America’s Culture War (New York: Free Press, 1994).

7. Ziad W. Munson, The Making of Pro-life Activists: How Social Movement Mobilization Works (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009).

8. The data in the figure are from the 2008 Common Congressional Election Survey, which was similar to the previously cited 2006 study, and the median size of towns in the county in which each respondent lived was estimated in the same way.

9. In General Social Surveys conducted in 2004, 2006, and 2008, respondents were asked how strongly they agreed or disagreed that “homosexual couples should have the right to marry one another”; 57 percent of respondents in nonmetropolitan areas with fewer than twenty thousand residents said they disagreed or strongly disagreed, compared with 51 percent among respondents in larger metropolitan areas, yet the effect of residence was statistically insignificant in binary logistic regression analysis in which age, gender, race, region, and education were controlled. A question about approval or disapproval of a homosexual being allowed to teach school showed that approval in the small nonmetropolitan towns rose from 49 percent in the 1970s to 75 percent in surveys conducted between 2000 and 2008, which roughly paralleled the rise among all respondents from 51 to 79 percent. Data collected in the American National Election Studies, electronic data files, provide less precise measures, but show that mean “feeling thermometer” scores for feelings toward gays and lesbians rose from 22.4 in 1984 to 41.2 in 2000 in the “rural” population (which comprised approximately a third of the samples, and included persons living on farms, in small towns, and in open-country areas), compared with a rise from 30.5 to 45.9 for suburban residents, and from 35.4 to 47.0 for center-city residents.

10. David Bell, “Cowboy Love,” in Country Boys: Masculinity and Rural Life, ed. Hugh Campbell, Michael Mayerfield Bell, and Margaret Finney (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2006), 163–82; Will Fellows, Farm Boys: Lives of Gay Men from the Rural Midwest (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2001).

11. These questions were asked in the 2006 Common Congressional Election Survey, and showed that among respondents living in nonmetropolitan counties in which the median population of towns was twenty-five thousand or less, 88 percent said they knew someone who was gay, and among that 88 percent, 20 percent said the person they knew was a family member, 22 percent said the person was a close friend, 14 percent said the person was a coworker, and 4 percent said that they were the person they had in mind.

12. Eleven states, all with sizable rural populations, passed constitutional amendments in 2004 codifying marriage as an exclusively heterosexual institution: Arkansas, Georgia, Kentucky, Michigan, Mississippi, Montana, North Dakota, Ohio, Oklahoma, Oregon, and Utah.

13. Kitzmiller, et al. v. Dover Area School District, decided for the plaintiffs on December 20, 2005, complete transcript of testimony, http://www.talkorigins.org. For the remarks of one of the scientists who provided expert testimony in the case, see also Kenneth R. Miller, Finding Darwin’s God: A Scientist’s Search for Common Ground between God and Evolution (New York: Harper Perennial, 2007); Kenneth R. Miller, Only a Theory: Evolution and the Battle for America’s Soul (New York: Viking Adult, 2008); Harold W. Attridge, ed., The Religion and Science Debate: Why Does It Continue? (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009).

14. General Social Surveys, electronic data files. A question asked in 2004 of 1,304 respondents showed that 6 percent of respondents in nonmetropolitan communities of fewer than twenty thousand residents thought it was definitely true that “human beings developed from earlier species of animal,” whereas 52 percent said this was definitely not true and an additional 16 percent said it was probably not true (and among metropolitan respondents, 39 percent said the statement was definitely not true). My qualitative interviews suggest that one of the nuances survey questions often fail to capture is between people who believe generally in evolution within species or some instances across species, and yet reject the idea that humans evolved from other species. An example would be this comment: “I don’t think that we started out as one cell, and that we crawled up out of the ocean and grew legs, but by the same token I know there are animals like the walruses, and maybe at one time they had feet they didn’t use and so slowly evolved.”

15. We talked to devout church members who thought the Ten Commandments should be taught at home or in the church yet not at school because that would necessitate including lessons about other religions at school. This comment from a Southern Baptist is typical: “Personally, I’m not sure that teaching religion in the public schools would be a good idea. As much as I want to see the Ten Commandments taught in schools, in this day and age with our culture what it is, we can’t really open the door to teach one religion in our schools without teaching other religions in our schools. I would not want some teacher teaching a different religion to my children. I think the parents need to be teaching these things at home.”

16. A seeming exception to the pragmatic approach to school controversies is the view that outsiders are preventing townspeople from having their way, as in this example, “When they say that they can’t have a prayer in school, that just burns me. That is a part of our country. A part of our country. It always has been, and then when you try to take it away, I don’t like that. I think they need to let prayer stay in school.” In other remarks, this woman, who is a local elected official, makes it clear that “they” means forces outside the community, especially the federal government. It makes her mad not to have prayer in schools, but she also is pragmatic in thinking that having prayer would not be a problem in her nearly homogeneous community of fewer than eight hundred people.

17. The six-day creationist elaborated, “As far as what should be taught, we do not live in a theocracy, and I don’t want to change anyone. I don’t believe in that. I think that evolution should be taught as a theory with evidences pro and con given. I think evolution should be taught. I think intelligent design should be taught as a theory. And I think at least reference should be made to the creation model, which is who that designer is, taking it a step further. Not that that should be debated in a science class, but some type of reference [should be] made to the fact that we see so much intelligence in the design around us. I think it is just wrong that we stifle that conversation.”

18. The science teacher felt there “may be some connection” between “the religious belief in creationism and evolution,” so he was happy to mention both, but insisted the two should not be confused, and also could easily be separated by presenting evolution as science and intelligent design as something else—possibly religion or faith. The most general term that people who described themselves as open minded used was “theory,” by which they meant that evolution was a good scientific account of how things happened, but was an account subject to revision; some, of course, thought it needed more revision than others.

19. Or as one woman says, “They don’t want anything shoved down their throats and they certainly don’t want you shoving anything down their kids’ throats.”

9. WASHINGTON IS BROKEN: POLITICS AND THE NEW POPULISM

1. See, for example, Jennifer Bradley and Bruce Katz, “Village Idiocy,” New Republic, October 8, 2008, 12–13; Ben MacIntyre, “Small Town America Still Dares to Think Big,” Times of London, September 25, 2008; Mark Greif, “Death and the Maiden,” Harpers, November 2008), 18; Andrew M. Langer, “Sarah Palin, Small-Town America,” U.S. News, September 12, 2008. For one of the best sociological analyses of Palin’s rise in popularity, see Jeffrey C. Alexander, The Performance of Politics: Obama’s Victory and the Democratic Struggle for Power (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), 193–242.

2. For several works that provide valuable historical overviews and interpretations of late nineteenth-century populism, see Lawrence Goodwyn, The Populist Moment: A Short History of the Agrarian Revolt in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978); Michael Kazin, The Populist Persuasion: An American History, rev. ed. (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1998); John Lukacs, Democracy and Populism: Fear and Hatred (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2006); Charles Postel, The Populist Vision (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007).

3. “Mr. Bush Goes to Washington,” Associated Press, January 18, 2001. Among other sources, for a discussion of Truman’s small-town roots, see David McCullough, Truman (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1992). For a look at Eisenhower’s roots in small towns, see Stephen E. Ambrose, Eisenhower: Soldier and President (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1990). On Carter’s roots, see Erwin C. Hargrove and James Sterling Young, Jimmy Carter as President: Leadership and the Politics of the Public Good (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1988). On Reagan’s, see Lou Cannon, President Reagan: The Role of a Lifetime (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1991). On Clinton’s, see Donald T. Phillips, The Clinton Charisma: A Legacy of Leadership (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007). On George W. Bush’s, see Justin A. Frank, Bush on the Couch: Inside the Mind of the President (New York: Harper, 2004).

4. Ron Formisano, “Populist Currents in the 2008 Presidential Campaign,” Journal of Policy History 22 (2010): 237–55.

5. The results shown in the figure are drawn from General Social Surveys conducted between 1998 and 2008 with the responses for these years aggregated to yield approximately eleven hundred respondents in nonmetropolitan towns of under twenty thousand population and approximately eight thousand for the general public (analysis of responses in the separate surveys conducted biennially during this period showed no significant trends on these questions). The exact percentages indicating that too much is being spent on each topic were, respectively, for small-town respondents and the public generally, 5.8 and 5.4 on education, 7.9 and 7.9 on health, 9.7 and 9.0 on law enforcement, 31.9 and 23.8 on assistance to blacks, 43.1 and 33.6 on assistance to big cities, and 45.2 and 40.2 on welfare (the “y” versions of the questions were used except for welfare). The possibility that differences between residents of small towns and those from larger places on the responses to these items might be because of other demographic factors was examined using binary logistic regression models in which respondents’ age, race, gender, region, and education level were controlled. The remaining odds ratios for small-town residence were 1.439 for assistance to cities, 1.383 for assistance to blacks, and 1.238 for welfare—all significant at the 0.001 level, and not significant for education, health, and law enforcement.

6. A similar theme emerged in comments that some interviewees volunteered about the health care reform legislation being debated in Washington, DC, at the time they were interviewed. Explaining the opposition in her community, the mayor of a town of eighteen hundred remarked, “There’s better ways to do it, and we know it and we are thinking, ‘OK, common sense, people, common sense.’ But we’re talking about lawyers [in Washington]. Lawyers and common sense usually don’t go together.”

7. At the time of the interview, critics of the Obama administration were likening it to the Roosevelt administration, so it is possible that this interviewee was reflecting those criticisms. In predominantly Republican rural communities, however, there were also long-standing perceptions that Roosevelt had been an easterner who did not understand the plight of farmers and residents in small heartland communities. Historians generally credit Roosevelt’s policies as being beneficial to agriculture, but also emphasize the controversies surrounding the Agricultural Adjustment Act of 1933, US Supreme Court’s ruling against it in 1936, new Agricultural Adjustment Act of 1938, and issues surrounding the exclusion of coverage for agricultural workers in the Social Security Act that Roosevelt signed into law in 1935. See, for example, Adam Cohen, Nothing to Fear: FDR’s Inner Circle and the Hundred Days That Created Modern America (New York: Penguin, 2009); Kenneth S. Davis, FDR: The New Deal Years, 1933–1937 (New York: Random House, 1995); Peter Fearon, Kansas in the Great Depression: Work Relief, the Dole, and Rehabilitation (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2007); Jim Powell, FDR’s Folly: How Roosevelt and His New Deal Prolonged the Great Depression (New York: Crown Press, 2003); Keith J. Volanto, Texas, Cotton, and the New Deal (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2004).

8. Although negative sentiments toward welfare recipients are hardly unique to residents of small towns, living in a small town appears to add two distinct dimensions to residents’ views: the sense that people in small communities are having to foot the bill for a problem that exists mostly in cities, and the fear that welfare recipients are moving into small towns in increasing numbers to take advantage of cheap housing and local services. Some long-term residents regard these newcomers as particularly violating the community’s norms of hard work and self-sufficiency. “Make mom and dad go to work instead of just living off handouts from the government,” one man says. He objects even to free or subsidized lunch programs for low-income schoolchildren. “Anybody who is too lazy to get up in the morning and put a bowl of cereal on the table for their kids,” he begins, and then trails off. “I don’t buy all this social experiment.” In another town, a woman who prides herself on being disciplined about the frugal income that she and her husband have, complains about adults who have been coddled so much that they are incapable of functioning as responsible citizens. “Small towns are getting the overflow of these unproductive people,” she says, “because of the rundown houses, living on the welfare check, and having the liquor store not too far down the road.” She blames the government for creating this “welfare generation” with its “let me do it for you” attitude.

9. “My son has gone four times to Afghanistan to the war,” was how one father voiced his sentiments about Washington, DC. “My son is fixing to go back for the fifth time. Last time I was in Washington I said, ‘How many more times is my child going to have to go off and fight this war, congressman?’ He couldn’t answer that. It was troubling to me.” The man went on to describe how people in his community were unhappy with everything in Washington, from questions about taxes and health care to concerns about schools and the environment.

10. The data in the figure are from the national survey conducted in 2000 as part of Robert Putnam’s Social Capital Benchmark Survey.

11. A widely used textbook asserts definitively that government in small towns is “likely to be dominated by small cliques” and is “laid-back,” decisions are made by a “principle of unanimity,” and studies show that political discussions focus “on personalities rather than on issues”; David R. Berman, State and Local Politics, 9th ed. (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1999), 233. The only study cited is of one town and was conducted in the 1950s. Another text mentions small towns only once in passing; Kevin B. Smith, State and Local Government (Washington, DC: CQ Press, 2007). Yet another does not deal with small towns at all; Ann M. Bowman and Richard C. Kearney, State and Local Government: The Essentials (Belmont, CA: Wadsworth, 2008).

12. Some of the details about the community and the damage have been altered to avoid inadvertently disclosing the town’s identity.

13. The data summarized in the figure are from General Social Surveys, cumulative electronic data file, conducted from 1972 through 2008, and aggregated by decade to compensate for sampling differences from survey to survey in the representation of small towns, here defined as respondents living in nonmetropolitan communities of 20,000 or fewer population. The total numbers of respondents for each decade equaled 10,652 in the 1970s, 14,241 in the 1980s, 13,223 in the 1990s, and 14, 927 in the 2000s. Party identification was measured by asking respondents if they identified as Republicans, Democrats, or independents. Binary logistic regression models were used to calculate the actual odds ratios for smalltown residents relative to people living in larger communities who identified as Republicans or Democrats, and the comparable estimated odds ratios with controls for gender, race, age, year of survey, four regions, and four levels of education.

14. Morris P. Fiorina, Samuel J. Abrams, and Jeremy C. Pope, Culture War? The Myth of a Polarized America, 3rd ed. (New York: Longman, 2010).

15. For an interesting discussion of the general tendency in rural communities to avoid disclosing directly how one voted and thus to rely on indirect means of disclosure, see Trudy Peterson, “Rural Life and the Privacy of Political Association,” Agricultural History 64 (1990): 1–8. This reluctance to disclose how a person voted was evident enough in our pilot interviews that in most of the interviews, we saved asking how the interviewee voted in the last presidential election until near the end of the interview, at which point nearly everyone revealed how they had voted, although some refused even though the interviews were confidential.

16. For a similar, insightfully developed point, see Nina Eliasoph, “Close to Home”: The Work of Avoiding Politics,” Theory and Society 26 (1997): 605–47.

17. Besides online and media sources, the Tea Party’s arguments were presented in several books. See, for example, Dick Armey and Matt Kibbe, Give Us Liberty: A Tea Party Manifesto (New York: William Morrow, 2010); Joseph Farah, The Tea Party Manifesto (New York: WND Books, 2010).

18. The data summarized in the figure are from a poll of 1,008 respondents conducted for CNN by the Opinion Research Corporation, April 9–11, 2010, electronic data file, courtesy of the Roper Center Public Opinion Archives at the University of Connecticut. The usual caution about low response rates applies to these data. The categories were developed by the Opinion Research Corporation, and refer to census definitions of urban, suburban, and rural along with the racial and ethnic composition of respondents’ communities.

19. Residents who were opposed to the Tea Party movement more often viewed it as being driven by outside interests, such as the logging, mining, or oil and gas industry.

20. An example of the opposing view was expressed by the city manager of a town in which 70 percent of the population was Hispanic and generally favored Democratic candidates. “I think Sarah Palin and the Tea Party advocates are divisive,” he said. “They are not getting us on the table. They are separating us and dividing us.” He added, “I may agree with them on some things about taxpayers’ rights, but the way they are going about it seems to be very partisan.”

21. For a useful summary of this literature through the 1990s, see Rory McVeigh and Christian Smith, “Who Protests in America: An Analysis of Three Political Alternatives—Inaction, Institutionalized Politics, or Protest,” Sociological Forum 14 (1999): 685–702. For a more recent discussion that emphasizes both local and translocal networks, see Jeffrey Stout, Blessed Are the Organized: Grassroots Democracy in America (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010).

22. Markus Prior, Post-Broadcast Democracy: How Media Choice Increases Inequality in Political Involvement and Polarizes Elections (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007); Markus Prior, “News v. Entertainment: How Increasing Media Choice Widens Gaps in Political Knowledge and Turnout,” American Journal of Political Science 49 (2005): 577–92.

23. Lila K. Khatiwada and Kenneth E. Pigg, “Internet Service Provision in the U.S. Counties: Is Spatial Pattern a Function of Demand?” American Behavioral Scientist 53 (2010): 1326–43; Michael J. Stern and Barry Wellman, “Rural and Urban Differences in the Internet Society: Real and Relatively Important,” American Behavioral Scientist 53 (2010): 1251–56.

24. US Census Bureau, Census of Governments, 2002: Government Organization (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 2002). This census indicates that the number of general-purpose governmental units totaled 87,525, and the number of special-purpose units was 48,558.

25. We talked to several residents in Rev. Buchanan’s community who said they did not share his views, but agreed that people in the area were distrustful of the federal government and thought some of the concern reflected negative attitudes about having an African American president.

10. KEEP YOUR DOORS OPEN: SHAPING THE FUTURE

1. Whether young people in small rural communities are sufficiently prepared and motivated to go to college is the topic of a long history of debate, of course, and is not one I address here. The difficulty with statistical generalizations that draw comparisons between rural and urban youths, even when controlling for other variables, such as geographic location and parents’ education, is that these generalizations fail to acknowledge the diversity that exists from family to family and town to town, or capture the complex sentiments of parents about the value of higher education and particular difficulties that a young person from a small town may experience. Those are the issues with which I am concerned in this chapter. For the broader debate, see Thomas Espenshade and Alexandria Walton Radford, No Longer Separate, Not Yet Equal: Race and Class in Elite College Admission and Campus Life (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009); Elizabeth A. Armstrong and Laura Hamilton, Exclusion: Class, Gender, and College Culture (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010); Patrick J. Carr and Maria J. Kefalas, Hollowing Out the Middle: The Rural Brain Drain and What It Means for America (Boston: Beacon, 2009). For an interesting example of the sensitivities involved in generalizations about rural residents, especially in conjunction with questions about race, class, and religion, see Ross Douthat, “The Roots of White Anxiety,” New York Times, July 18, 2010. Douthat drew selectively from the Espenshade and Radford book, and elicited a large number of replies from the newspaper’s readers. Espenshade and Radford’s study of admission to elite colleges noted, almost in passing, that precollege participation in “career-oriented” extracurricular activities reduced the likelihood of admission, unlike participation in other extracurricular activities that increased it, controlling for a large number of other factors, and offered this additional comment: “These activities include ROTC and co-op work programs. They might also encompass 4-H Clubs, Future Farmers of America, and other activities that suggest that students are somewhat undecided about their academic futures” (Espenshade and Radford, No Longer Separate, 126). Douthat’s column argued that elite colleges were guilty of a liberal cultural bias that discriminated against students in ROTC, 4-H clubs, and Future Farmers of America, and concluded that the nation would be better off if these colleges “admitted a few more R.O.T.C cadets, and a few more aspiring farmers.” Replies from readers ran the gamut from those who agree with Douthat, to those who doubted that farm youths wanted to go to college at all, to those who thought plenty of good colleges and universities existed in states with large rural populations. In Remaking the Heartland, I examined data from the Midwest states showing how some of these states did better than others in training and retaining college-educated youths, and how college-educated residents differed from other residents in geographic mobility.

2. The probabilities in the figure are calculated from the Public Use Five Percent Sample from the 2000 census and are for residents currently living in non-metropolitan areas. Among those living in metropolitan areas, the probability of having left their birth state is 59 percent among thirty-nine-year-olds who have graduated from college and 47 percent among thirty-nine-year-olds who have not graduated from college.

3. Just as in cities and suburbs, rates of college attendance among young people who grow up in small towns and rural areas vary considerably. Data from the 1999 Schools and Staffing Survey conducted for the National Center for Education Statistics, an electronic data file representing 19,672 high schools (weighted cases) with any twelfth graders during the 1999–2000 academic year shows that in 13 percent of the schools in small towns and rural areas, fewer than 10 percent of seniors were planning to attend a four-year college, between 10 and 29 percent were in 25 percent of the schools, between 30 and 59 percent were in 45 percent of the schools, between 60 and 79 percent were in 14 percent of the schools, and 80 percent or more were in 3 percent of the schools. Compared with schools in central cities and urban-fringe areas, the schools in small towns were clustered more toward the middle range of the distribution—meaning that fewer of these schools were ones in which very low or very high percentages of seniors planned to attend college. Ordinary least squares regression analysis of the data shows that the mean percentage of seniors planning to attend a four-year college is positively influenced by size of high school, negatively influenced by percentage of minority students, and significantly lower controlling for these other factors in the South and West compared to the Northeast and Midwest. Taking these factors into account, location in a small town or rural area has a small positive effect on the mean percentage of seniors planning to attend a four-year college.

4. Public Use One Percent Sample, US Census, 1990, courtesy of Steven Ruggles, J. Trent Alexander, Katie Genadek, Ronald Goeken, Matthew B. Schroeder, and Matthew Sobek, Integrated Public Use Microdata Series: Version 5.0 [machine-readable database] (Minneapolis: Minnesota Population Center, 2010). Binary logistic regression analysis of the “marst” variable recoded to combine married spouse present, married spouse absent, separated, divorced, or widowed versus never married with the “metro” variable (excluding metro status undefined) recoded as not in metropolitan area versus combined metropolitan in and outside central city and central city undefined, controlling for age, sex, and race recoded as white versus all other categories. The odds ratio for nonmetropolitan versus metropolitan residence was 1.735, significant at or beyond the 0.001 level of probability. See the following note about 1990 versus later definitions of metropolitan and nonmetropolitan.

5. Public Use One Percent Sample, 1960 census, and Public Use One Percent Sample, 1990 census; results for persons age sixteen through twenty-one living in nonmetropolitan areas, separate binary logistic regression models for men and women, with race and age controlled, and currently or ever married versus never married as the independent variable. The adjusted odds ratio for men in 1960 was 0.260, for women in 1960 was 0.128, for men in 1990 was 0.321, and for women in 1990 was 0.236—all significant at or beyond the 0.001 level of probability. In the figure, the columns labeled “baseline” show simply that if there were no differences between those who were married and those who were never married, the odds ratios would be 1.0; the other columns show the odds ratios for each comparison. For example, the column furthest to the right shows that the odds of having at least one year of college among married women are 0.236 as large as the odds among never married women. In these samples, 31 percent in 1960 were classified as living in nonmetropolitan areas and 27.4 percent were in 1990, but that proportion dropped to 8.4 percent in 2000. For a description of the definition of metropolitan areas, see US Census Bureau, Statistical Abstract of the United States: 2010 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 2010), appendix II, 879.

6. The National Center for Education Statistics 1999 Schools and Staffing Survey, electronic data file, showed that graduation rates were higher in small town and rural high schools than in center-city and urban-fringe schools, controlling for differences in size of school, percentage minority students, and region. The effects of state equalization policies were also evident in the fact that student-to-teacher ratios and per pupil expenditures were similar across locations. Schools in small towns and rural areas received 51 percent of their revenue from state funds, as did center-city schools, compared with only 44 percent among urban-fringe schools.

7. David Brooks, “The Odyssey Years,” New York Times, October 9, 2007. For a sociological discussion of the topic, see Neil J. Smelser, The Odyssey Experience: Physical, Social, Psychological, and Spiritual Journeys (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009).

8. The notion of portable small-town values here is indebted to the wonderful memoir Portable Prairie: Confessions of an Unsettled Midwesterner (New York: Thomas Dunne, 2004) by former small-town South Dakota resident M. J. Andersen.

9. Her report of the stories and the exact words that she communicates to her students is an instance of something that was evident in many of the interviews: respondents were not simply making up some hypothetical advice because an interviewer asked them a question; they were repeating advice they had given to their own children, students, young people in congregations, and others they knew. “I was just talking to a young man this morning and told him ….,” “I’ll tell you what I tell my children.” or “The students hear me say this a lot” were the kinds of comments that revealed what in discourse analysis is called quoted speech.

10. For a detailed examination of the more general tendency among Americans to exclude money from their accounts of work, see Robert Wuthnow, Poor Richard’s Principle: Recovering the American Dream through the Moral Dimension of Work, Business, and Money (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996). I am aware, as I am sure many residents of small towns are, of the correlation in statistical studies between wealth and happiness. See, for example, Derek Bok, The Politics of Happiness: What Government Can Learn from the New Research on Well-being (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010). This research also documents a correlation between happiness and feeling integrated into a community.

11. I have been drawn repeatedly to the richness of home as a metaphor for community. For an insightful discussion of this, see Mary Douglas, “The Idea of a Home: A Kind of Space,” in Home: A Place in the World, ed. Arien Mack (New York: New York University Press, 1993), 253–72. For my own look at homes and dwellings used in religious metaphors, see Robert Wuthnow, After Heaven: Spirituality in America since the 1950s (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998). For an exploration of the idea of permeable boundaries in relation to small towns, see Robert Wuthnow, Loose Connections: Joining Together in America’s Fragmented Communities (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998).

11. CONCLUDING REFLECTIONS: COMMUNITY IN SMALL TOWNS

1. Suzanne Keller, Community: Pursuing the Dream, Living the Reality (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003. For a brief discussion that mentions many of the same elements of community as Keller’s, see Philip Selznick, The Moral Commonwealth: Social Theory and the Promise of Community (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), 360–65.

2. For an illuminating discussion of the importance of spatial conditions and circumstances in an urban setting, see Mario Luis Small, Villa Victoria: The Transformation of Social Capital in a Boston Barrio (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 123–44. For a broader survey, see Thomas F. Gieryn, “A Space for Place in Sociology,” Annual Review of Sociology 26 (2000): 463–96.

3. Ray Oldenburg, The Great Good Place: Cafes, Coffee Shops, Community Centers, Beauty Parlors, General Stores, Bars, Hangouts, and How They Get You through the Day (New York: Paragon House, 1989).

4. Sonya Salamon, Newcomers to Old Towns: Suburbanization of the Heartland (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003). In her study of six Illinois towns, Salamon argues that these central public spaces symbolize the community’s priorities and serve importantly to promote cross-age social relationships.

5. See especially Daniel T. Lichter, Domenico Parisi, Steven Michael Grice, and Michael C. Taquino, “National Estimates of Racial Segregation in Rural and Small-Town America,” Demography 44 (2007): 563–81. This study, using 1990 and 2000 data, finds that levels of racial segregation are as high in small towns as in metropolitan areas. For another example of contested territory between newcomers and old-timers, see Sonya Salamon and Jane B. Tornatore, “Territory Contested through Property in a Midwestern Post-agricultural Community,” Rural Sociology 59 (1994): 636–54.

6. Michele Lamont and Virag Molnar, “The Study of Boundaries in the Social Sciences,” Annual Review of Sociology 28 (2002): 167–95.

7. James W. Loewen, Sundown Towns: A Hidden Dimension of American Racism (New York: New Press, 2005); Eileen Diaz McConnell and Faranak Miraftab, “Sundown Town to ‘Little Mexico’: Old-timers and Newcomers in an American Small Town,” Rural Sociology 74 (2009): 605–29.

8. For an article based on a detailed analysis of associational ties—in this case, within Bristol and Glasgow—see Delia Baldassarri and Mario Diani, “The Integrative Power of Civic Networks,” American Journal of Sociology 113 (2007): 735–80.

9. Mircea Eliade, Myth and Reality (New York: Harper and Row, 1963).

10. Emile Durkheim, Elementary Forms of the Religious Life, trans. Carol Cosman, ed. Mark S. Cladis (1915; repr., Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008).

11. Randall Collins, Interaction Ritual Chains (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005).

12. For an interesting parallel discussion of community definitions being debated at meetings in urban project housing, see Sudhir Alladi Venkatesh, American Project: The Rise and Fall of a Modern Ghetto (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000).

13. By neutral public space, I mean venues in which people can interact as if they were equals and are constrained to do so by the presence of bystanders; this usage follows the helpful discussion in Rudolf P. Gaudio, “Coffeetalk: Starbucks and the Commercialization of Casual Conversation,” Language in Society 32 (2003): 659-91.

14. For an instructive source of insights about the ways in which ritualized interaction in situations otherwise ridden with tense emotions serves in most instances to prevent outbursts or physical violence from occurring, see Randall Collins, Violence: A Micro-sociological Theory (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008). I am grateful to Devany Schulz for the example of tension between mothers-in-law and daughters-in-law.

15. For an excellent discussion of the factors, including gender, age, ethnicity, landownership, and farm management styles, that structure social networks in farming communities, see Sonya Salamon, Prairie Patrimony: Family, Farming, and Community in the Midwest (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1992).