New Life in the Old Village
MARGOLIS, RICHARD J.
States of the Union NEW LIFE NTHE OLD VILLAGE BY RICHARD J. MARGOLIS The small community has been the very predominant form of human living throughout the history of mankind. —Robert Redfdhld...
...During this period three-fourths of all nonmetropolitan communities registered population gains, and those gains occurred in more than two-thirds of all rural counties...
...What we can look forward to, it seems, is a readjustment of some old habits of thinking...
...The numbers tell a different story: 80% of all automobile accidents causing injury or death involve cars traveling under 40 miles per hour...
...Their reasons range all over the lot: seat belts are troublesome to put on, they are uncomfortable, or they wrinkle your clothes...
...The emotional blend is nicely exemplified in a town plan that was published recently by St...
...He equated that estimate of the future with Social Darwinism, observing testily: "The doctrine of the 'survival of the fittest' means only that what survives is that which is fittest under the particular existing circumstances...
...GM is offering one such restraint—a new type of automatic belt—as an option on the 1980 Chevette to gain insight into its public acceptance...
...In general, most academic observers of the American social scene also would probably endorse the saturnine opinions of William Simon and John H. Gagnon, as expressed in their essay on "The Decline and Fall of the Small Town": "The land and the economy of the United States will not support as many small towns as they did before...
...By the 1982 model year, we must begin putting passive restraints in all full-size cars and, eventually, into the entire fleet...
...Some early soundings of those profound transformations were taken in 1971 by Glenn V. Fuguitt, the highly respected demographer, in his study, "The Places Left Behind: Population Trends and Policy for Rural America...
...Yet both the new order and the old had more surprises in store...
...It exists where women and men come together to create symbols of their common life...
...Most have written off the village as a quaint anachronism at best and a barrier to "progress" at worst...
...But genuine culture, true human community, is not manufactured in a television studio, and it is not primarily bought and sold...
...That the Nebraska project sanctifying small town life gets its money from big government—through a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities—should not surprise us...
...Later—in the '30s, and again in the '60s and '70s—some writers reversed the picture, portraying American hamlets as oases of old-fashioned virtue in a desert of industrial venality...
...The declarations that now issue forth from small communities combine pride and resentment in about equal proportions—pride in civic possibilities and resentment at the way global enthusiasts seem to have written them off...
...The dictates of the new demography are likely to impose many such anomalies, whereby we depend on centralized authority to promote decentralization...
...What is notable in W. F. Cottrell's widely reprinted study, "Death by Die-selization," is the quietly effective way he questions the validity of our old friend, Social Darwinism...
...they may in fact serve as little more than population nodes...
...Other Americans, meanwhile, have been traveling in the opposite direction, affirming with their feet the efficacy of small communities...
...The currents of American energy moved around and beyond the small towns, leaving them isolated, demoralized, with their young people leaving them behind like abandoned ghost towns...
...Then, after documenting the trend, he came to an interesting conclusion: "As one who has studied small towns and villages for a number of years, I am struck by the fact that they prevail despite most people's efforts to write them off...
...By contrast, the new Utopia focuses on the village and intimacies it can provide...
...The rhetoric of this revisionism goes beyond mere Jeffersonianism and its promise of a democracy kept green by the labors of small landholders...
...they may even lose considerable population...
...and therefore, seat belts don't matter...
...No less fair-minded a sociologist than Scott Greer has claimed, in The Concept of Community, that although villages "have formed the economic and demographic base for the majority of the world's population since the Neolithic era . . . the high points of history have occurred in the city...
...Curiously, these social scientists do not stop at depicting metropolitan culture as the wave of the future...
...In fact, in the vast majority of cases, seat belts protect passengers from severe injuries, allowing them to escape more quickly...
...It was 18th-century individualism with a vengeance...
...This one was an investigation into the problems faced by residents of a small town in the Southwest, Caliente, when their primary employer, a railroad company, switched from steam power to diesel power, thereby throwing a large number of villagers out of work...
...Here again, research has proved that to be untrue—you are almost always safer inside the car...
...In a crude society, fine qualities may be under great handicaps...
...Accepting the laissez faire philosophy of social change, one must say that those who control and execute change will win, [and] those who represent the old order lose...
...In the first paragraph Fuguitt announced the startling news: "There is evidence of an emerging decentralization trend around larger nonmetropol-itan centers...
...Nonetheless, a small number of social scientists and rural advocates have all along espoused a wholly different vision of rural community life, one more flattering and less fatalistic...
...One could sympathize with Oren Lee Staley, president of the National Farmers Organization, when he uttered his dark, oft-quoted jeremiad: "The farmhouse lights are going out all over America...
...If you're one of those people who don't use belts for one reason or another, please think carefully about your motivations...
...Whoever keeps the small community alive and at its best during this dark period, whoever clarifies, refines and strengthens the small community may have more to do with the final emergence of a great society than those who dominate big industry and big government...
...It has been shown that in a car, the driver is considered to be an authority figure...
...And please remember children can be severely injured in automobile accidents, too...
...Many people say they know the facts, but they still don't wear belts...
...In the 1960s and '70s, Americans began to change their patterns of settlement and mobility, with the upshot that rural community life revived in many places...
...moreover, the wild swings in our literature from cynicism to romanticism tell us much about our own vacillations regarding community...
...Well, certainly they are the ones who have written it...
...Scott Greer shrewdly touched on this in a comment he made, in 1969, on Cottrell's "Dieselization" study...
...Even nonmetropolitan areas that are far distant from urban . . . influence—the kinds of places that used to be regarded as 'nowhere' in the 1950s —have been registering net migration gains instead of their once perennial losses...
...In the '70s it occurred to us that small is beautiful...
...The anthropologist Walter Goldschmidt brought out As You Sow in 1947, his classic study of the effects of agribusiness on rural community life in California...
...While neither of these views is wholly accurate, both do reflect authentic facets of village life...
...in the '80s we may also learn that it is durable—a fixed imperative of our national life...
...And Greer went on to ask, profit for whom...
...Some of the "baffling" facts cited by Morrison and Wheeler are as follows: • Each year between 1970-75, for every 100 people who moved to the metropolitan sector, 131 moved out...
...The roots of civilization," he wrote, "are elemental traits—good will, neighbor-liness, fair play, courage, tolerance, open-minded inquiry, patience...
...Johnsbury, Vermont: "There is a need for intimate human relationships," the planners write, "for the security of settled home and associations, for spiritual unity and for orderly transmission of the basic cultural inheritance...
...In it Morgan made the familiar argument that the nation relies on small towns as a "seedbed of values...
...Some people even think getting hurt or killed in a car accident is a question of fate...
...But until you purchase one of these cars of the future, you can protect yourself and others by using seat belts and urging your family and friends to follow your example...
...They may not perform the same functions as previously...
...Goldschmidt attempted to show that the presence of agribusiness in the San Joaquin Valley, with its aggregates of machinery and wealth, was antithetical to the social health of nearby villages...
...Experts estimate that about half of all automobile occupant fatalities last year might have been avoided if the people had been wearing seat belts...
...He technological change" and "intervention of the state"—that he insists are just as "natural," "normal" and "rational...
...are learned in the intimate, friendly world of the family and the small community...
...Large and learned tomes have been devoted to demonstrating the inevitable disappearance of rural community life before the onslaught of urban technology and the social institutions it has spawned...
...With the new demography new hope has come to small-community advocates...
...Here are a few of the common rationalizations...
...Those were the years when rural schools by the thousands were consolitous and irreversible—the reasons for it seemed to differ in each darkening town...
...they also insist it was the wave of the past...
...In 1957 the social commentator Max Lerner, dated out of existence, joining rural churches, banks and other local organizations in a parade of extinction...
...This advertisement is part of our continuing effort to give customers useful information about their cars and trucks and the company that builds them...
...A simple reminder from you may help save someone's life...
...At GM, we're very concerned about safety...
...The writers proceed to answer: "For the first time in this century, and probably in the nation's history, more Americans are moving away from metropolitan areas than are moving to them, in an abrupt and baffling reversal of the long established trend toward urbanization...
...but somehow they stay in there for census after census...
...their heads remain stuffed with Marshall McLuhan's electronic contrivance of the '60s, the Global Village...
...Its flattering side is typified in the works of the late Arthur E. Morgan, who, among other things, was the Tennessee Valley Authority's first chairman and a long-time president of Antioch College...
...If the long rural night appeared oddly "all-of-a-piece"—complete, ubiquicontinued: "These finer underlying traits...
...Because so many people still don't use their seat belts, the government has directed that some form of passive restraint—one that doesn't require any action by the occupant-be built into every car by the 1984 model year...
...Close upon the heels of Gold-schmidt's lament came another...
...Belts prevent this...
...But before exploring the new demographics these citizens have wrought, let us first examine the uneven intellectual struggle that has long been waged by opposing community scholars...
...In our rush to industrialize and prosper we have become a nation of strangers, a mass society that appears distressingly transient and impersonal...
...Indeed, individual as the reasons were, to Greer they had a single cause: a changing technology placed at the service of profit...
...In the early part of the present century, writers like Sherwood Anderson and Sinclair Lewis made small towns notorious as mean-spirited islands of provincialism in a sea of civilized ur-banism...
...Are your objections to seat belts based on the facts or on rationalizations...
...It is very difficult not to see the future as a long drawn-out struggle for community survival, lasting for half a century, in which some battles may be won but the war will be lost...
...That anyone can still seriously entertain McLuhan's oddly urban notion, replacing the warm satisfactions of face-to-face human intimacies with the cool communications of video, suggests that some village idiots may have migrated to the city...
...Others after Morgan carried on the debate—none perhaps so passionately, but several, by force of their marshaled evidence, more persuasively...
...Another popular rationalization: you'll be saved by being thrown clear of the car...
...And three quarters of all collisions happen less than 25 miles from the driver's home...
...This was poignantly expressed by the headline of a recent newspaper: 'small town dies, but life goes on.'" The emerging trend that Fuguitt spotted in 1971 has been fully confirmed in subsequent years—and precisely summarized by Peter A. Morrison and Judith P. Wheeler in a recent Population Bulletin published by the Population Reference Bureau...
...A future in which most such towns will become isolated or decayed, in which the local amenities must deteriorate, and in which there will finally be left only the aged, the inept, the very young—and the local power elite...
...General Motors People building transportation to serve people...
...Not surprisingly, Morgan was among the first to seriously challenge metropolitan determinism, ready as early as the '40s to consign rural villages to the 20th-century scrap-heap...
...The Caliente he speaks of," wrote Greer, "may stand for hundreds of other towns, from Jerome, Arizona, which died as its copper deposits reached unprofitable levels for extraction, to Baird, Texas, which died as the improvements in roads and automobiles brought it into competition with the much larger city of Abilene...
...The American public's attitude toward small communities has been characterized by a strange ambivalence, a mixture of affection and scorn, attraction and repellence...
...The first sentence in the book told the story: "From industrialized sowing of the soil is reaped an urbanized society...
...It was anything but coincidental that these village-oriented attacks on fatalism should appear during a period of near-catastrophic rural attrition— when, in the name of progress, thousands of small-town institutions were dismantled or allowed to die...
...Similarly, the Nebraska writers of a series of village histories, in a Morganlike manifesto, have declared: "In a time when the nation and the world are wondering why the countryside is being depopulated, why small towns are being destroyed, it is too easy to answer, 'Because they have too little past, too little excitement, too little future.' This [idea] may be a product of the media and of the massive centralization of things in our society—the cult of bigness...
...The Federal government contributed to this rout during the '50s by closing nearly 6,000 small-community post offices, more than twice the number shut down in the previous decade...
...One of Morgan's books, The Small Community: Foundation of Democratic Life, published in 1942, is a 312-page hymn of praise to small-town America...
...Robert Redfdhld in Little Community (1955) Amajor event of the '70s, the comeback of American villages, has been largely overlooked by social commentators...
...Make sure Child Restraint Systems are used for children who aren't old enough to use regular seat belts...
...America's modern scholars, though, have seemed more sure of their ground...
...The slogan 'Progress Requires Sacrifice,'" he noted, "conceals the question: Who will benefit and who will lose...
...In response to the shibboleths commonly used to justify the railroad's virtual abandonment of Caliente— "theinevitability of progress" and "the law of supply and demand"—Cottrell poses a different set of ideas—"protection . . . from in America Asa Civilization, accurately described the relentless process: "Somewhere between the turn of century and the New Deal, the small town felt the withering touch of the Great Artifact that we call American society, and in the quarter century between 1930 and 1955 the decisive turn was made away from small-town life...
...Here again, the tenets of economic determinism are asked to yield to "higher," more "human" values, including those of community...
...CUSTOMER INFORMATION FROM GENERAL MOTORS HOW TO SAVE YOUR LIFE AND THE ONE NEXT TO YOU OVERCOMING YOUR PSYCHOLOGICAL RESISTANCE TO SEAT BELTS MAY BE THE KEY...
...That's because injuries occur when the car stops abruptly and the occupants are thrown against the car's interior...
...The 'urbs,' the people of the cities, are the ones who have made history...
...The title of their study takes the form of a question, "Rural Renaissance in America...
...That vision isolated the yeoman farmer, tethering him to his land while separating him from his community...
...We have, by way of example, the White House press conference of last December 20, when President Carter, amid much fanfare, proposed to create a new position in the Federal bureaucracy—an under-secretary of agriculture for small communities and rural development...
...A spunky revisionism has set in —a reaction to what one rural commentator has called "all the dangerous '-ations'": dieselization, consolidation, regionalization and the like...
...Such an outcome, as Cottrell points out, punishes the virtuous and rewards the wicked...
...These the small community .. . can supply...
...Some people use seat belts for highway driving, but rationalize it's not worth the trouble to buckle up for short trips...
...When you're the driver, you have the psychological authority to convince all of the passengers that they should wear seat belts...
...So please fasten your seat belt, because even the best driver in the world can't predict what another driver will do...
...At bottom, it is a struggle for our civic sensibilities and can even be traced in our literature...
...Many people say they are afraid of being trapped in a car by a seat belt...
...The facts are startling...
Vol. 63 • January 1980 • No. 1
