Studies of civic space and the emergence of a modern civic sensibility have focused on urban areas. Small towns have been defined as sites of the traditional, places modernity invades but from which it does not itself develop. This paper attempts to grapple with the issues inherent in these assumptions, particularly the traditionalism-modernity dichotomy. Starting with an instinct that the location of tradition in small-town or rural life is simplistic if not simply erroneous, this paper ends with a query about the definition of modernism itself. The definition of modernism has been based on its relationship to traditional forms, but if tradition itself is revealed as an empty referent, a concept without a concrete space of its own, the terms of the debate themselves fall into disarray.
This paper concludes with the claim that small towns can best be understood in relationship to the networks which connect their inhabitants to markets, to government, and to cultural trends. When networks become the organizing principle of small-town life, events in bounded localities no longer appear merely traditional or increasingly modern. Instead, the public and civic spheres take on a broader definition, transcending space and the standard definitions of modern civic discourse. The small-town public spaces relied upon market exchange and government bureaucracy for its survival. As Habermas and other theorists of the public sphere have suggested, this profound interchange between the institutional structures of social interaction and bureaucratic modernism tended to efface standard liberalism from the landscape. But the society created no more fit the model of traditionalism than it did liberalism; ultimately, the small towns of Lyon county evaded any neat theoretical label. Instead the paper concludes with a vision of nodes and networks, and a call for greater attention to the exchanges across space along those networks.
This paper opens with a brief consideration of the historiography of small-town life. Theorists of civic space and the development of a modern political consciousness have posited certain essential characteristics of a modern public sphere. Often these characteristics are assumed to inhere uniquely in urban environments. This sense that rural spaces lack necessary modern characteristics owes a great deal to rural sociologists in the 1920s and 1930s, who were the first social scientists to study the small town as a separate site of human interaction, a place with social rules very different from those of purely urban or rural America. These sociologists imbued the small town with many of its traditional characteristics, usually defined in social and psychological terms. Contemporary anthropologists have returned to small towns and rural communities to re-examine the intersection of traditional world views with modern economic structures, particularly the mass media. Finally, historians of community in the United States have framed a structure for the historical investigation of small towns that might prove applicable to the twentieth-century United States, even though those community studies have until now largely been confined to a realm assumed to be traditional, colonial American history.
A community study must by definition be rooted in a specific place and time. This paper, with its concern for the intersection of tradition and modernity, focuses on a collection of small towns on the edge of the Great Plains breadbasket, specifically the villages and townships of Lyon county, Minnesota. Lyon county was chosen because it contained within it a series of towns with differing economic characters and ethnic compositions, and because preliminary investigations suggested a variety of fruitful sources. The period of investigation, 1938 to 1946, was chosen for its potential to reveal the influences of one of the greatest modernizing forces in contemporary life, the bureaucratic expansion of central governments during periods of heightened economic and military action. The notion that bureaucratization represents a unique and fundamental aspect of modernization makes the New Deal and the execution of World War II in the United States pivotal moments for the creation of a modern consciousness. (1) Their effects on small towns, presumed known to conventional wisdom, are treated with a greater degree of skepticism in this study.
The idea of public space has been a contested one for a generation now, and the renewed interest in civic exercise within that space has only fueled the debate. Small towns, with their greater tendency to blur the boundaries between public and private--boundaries essential to most definitions of the modern--pose special problems for historians of public and civic spaces. The formation of a modern public identity seems more difficult in an environment in which everyone admittedly knows everyone else. (2) A cursory examination of newspapers suggests that Lyon County inhabitants did not in the late 1930s enjoy any large degree of anonymity. (3) Indeed, the tax lists of personal property owners were published yearly in the papers of the county, making even the basic economic position of all community inhabitants public knowledge. Disbursements of county relief funds were also published yearly. (4) The result was not, however broad community consensus. "Community networks created hierarchies of inclusion in the social sphere." (5) Internal divisions could be detected in "declining levels of public participation in elections" and on-going debates over the nature of public education, to highlight only two key measures of political activity. (6) The challenge in such an environment thus becomes to determine which aspects of small-town life best constitute or reveal the public and civic arenas, if any, within which community identity is shaped and national position is established.
The nature of small-town spaces is itself crucial. From the earliest forays of rural sociologists into the countryside at the turn of this century, the unique public face of small towns have been a pressing concern. One sociologist in 1919 stated unequivocally, in reference to Midwestern villages, that small towns in the Midwestern landscape were "the ugly accent in an endless panorama of interest and beauty." (7) Recent scholarship has focused not on an aesthetic ideal of physical space but rather on the human relations promoted by spatial organization, and the way those spatial relationships reflect back onto community life. The symbolism of Main Street in particular signals the interconnection of local places to wider networks; its constituent elements almost universally serve commercial networks which transcend the boundaries of village, township, or county. In its gas stations, general stores, and farm implement dealerships, Main Street locates the particular within an idiom of imagined landscape and shapes how small-town communities envision themselves. 'Main Street' is recognizable across space and time, becoming the central symbol for small-town identity. The daily rhythms of transaction between townsfolk, rural farmers and big-city industrialists defined this identity as one of trans-spatial relationships. From goods bearing national brand names to railroad cars bearing Chicago and New York addresses, small town inhabitants forever confronted their place within wider market networks. On the flat prairie lands of southwestern Minnesota, the railroad tracks and dusty roads leading out of town sent a visual signal that small towns were only nodes along a possibly infinite commercial network.
The role of government in promoting community identity, the bureaucratization of everyday life, has been considered one of the hallmarks of an essentially modern world system. In the case of the American Middle West, as was true for the American West generally, government intervention was a constant from the beginnings of European invasion. Railroad concessions gave birth to prairie towns; state-defined methods of incorporation determined the forms of community establishment. At the same time, modern life did appear in the early years of the twentieth century to demand new levels of group action under state leadership. The introduction of public high schools on a broad scale represented a new level of government mediation in the socialization function of the family. Economic transformations sparked new voluntary associations organized to campaign for progressive reforms of the market. The resulting bureaucratic structures, and the explosion of government programs in response to the 1930s depression, rapidly penetrated small-town society and transformed the social and civic spheres.
Any consideration of civic space in modernizing rural America must therefore consider those arenas which best exemplified the political lives of village dwellers. The national associations of businessmen and the cultural clubs of middle-class women both appeared in Lyon county society soon after preliminary settlement. By the 1930s, these organizations had assumed a vital role in the public life of the community. Through their leadership of commemorative events and their fund-raising for civic projects, local associations integrated local identity into a broader pattern of public activity. (8) The assumption of civic duties by private associations blurred the boundaries between state and society, making analysis of small-town politics considerably more difficult.
In practice, this means historians must devote careful consideration to small-town schools and to the overlapping network of village, township, and county governing bodies. Ultimately, the schools served as greater instruments and arenas of political participation for most people in small towns; in the majority of cases, village and township boards oriented themselves toward implementation of the laws and regulations imposed from state and federal agencies. (9) This experience of bureaucratic regulation in itself shaped the political consciousness of small-town inhabitants, reinforcing traditional inclinations toward low taxation and minimal bureaucratic interference in the daily lives of local people. At the same time, the ever-growing penetration of market forces, and the transportation and communication networks which agricultural production and consumption helped generate, always located these particular small-town characteristics within a wider world. (10)
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