This paper represents only a preliminary investigation into the nature of small-town public spaces and the civic identities which arose out of those places. Even a cursory examination of small-town society revealed a vast series of networks--economic, political, and social--whose effects on rural and village life have largely gone unnoticed in the historiography. The early decades of the twentieth century brought vast change to a region only recently settled; before any sort of established tradition could be enshrined, modern forces of immigration, market growth, private and public bureaucratization, and government expansion all knit local communities into new life systems. Townsfolk envisioned their role in society as one both of service and of transmission, but the meanings of that service changed with the currents of action elsewhere. Often the sense of connection to places elsewhere undermined political involvement, deprived the public sphere of a vitality standard theorists believe essential for liberal democracy. To point back to only one example, bureaucratic leadership replaced active party politics as the instrument for popular participation in governmental affairs. The responses of townsfolk in shaping their nodes along broader networks, the exchanges of goods and ideas in both directions, the effect this had on public spaces, all suggest that small towns offer fertile ground for future investigation into the nature of twentieth-century political and cultural identity.
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