Recognizing modernity has never been an easy task for historians or theorists; twentieth-century philosophers have devoted considerable energy to envision a modern life-system which will best meet the needs of people in the contemporary world. From these theories and visions have arisen a variety of frameworks by which historians can measure the degree to which a people or place are modern. One of the earliest modernization theories, and that upon which this paper relies most heavily, came from Max Weber. Weber identified bureaucratization as the key element in modern life, the routinization and institutionalization of previously organic human interactions. Weber located modern bureaucratization in the transformations of the capitalist market, the logic of capital concentration and the managerial class that arose to direct its path. (11) Because bureaucratization has played such an enormous role in the development of American politics and government, the Weberian notion of modernity is particularly fruitful for understanding the nature of the small-town civic sphere. In Lyon county at least, state and commercial bureaucracies pervade public life.
Of course, Weber's interpretations of modernity have not gone unchallenged in the twentieth century, when the rapid expansion of governments and the rise of totalitarianism have suggested new forms of modernist crisis. The most influential modern theorist of the public sphere, another key concept of analysis when discussing social interaction in small towns, is Jurgen Habermas, whose ideas about liberalism and the need for a space separate from government interference have recently had enormous effects on historical scholarship. (12) Habermas's appreciation for middle-class association and the ability of people to engage in communicative action without undue influence from government bureaucracy poses a serious problem for historians of American small towns. In the 150 years since Alexis de Tocqueville celebrated the associational impulses of American residents, the forces of modernity as defined by Weber have steadily undermined the ability of Americans to create a liberal public sphere.
Furthermore, the market has penetrated the public realm to such a degree that communicative action may be under attack not only by the government it seeks to control but by the economy which made middle-class liberalism possible in the first place. In the theory of Jean Cohen and Andrew Arato, the capitalist economy and the modern bureaucratic administration together coordinate action in a process of system integration. The societal response according to Cohen and Arato is a structural "differentiation of the life-world . . . the emergence of institutions specialized in the reproduction of traditions, solidarities, and identities." (13) This differentiation is for Cohen and Arato a key aspect of the modernization process, one way of differentiating modern from traditional life systems. Of course, a place such as Lyon county, settled by immigrants whose earliest public association, the church, served to defend and reproduce tradition and ethnic identity, does not simply act as a modern space in Cohen and Arato's framework. Indeed, the differentiation of the life system often appears to protect the traditional in non-liberal ways, posing a threat to the rights-based liberal polity Cohen and Arato attempt to defend. This investigation of the historical condition of small towns is not animated by a similar concern for the liberal polity. It is not clear from the evidence that such a polity, at least as defined by standard theory, existed in Lyon county.
In their own investigations of the public sphere, historians and sociologists have relied on the "analytic axis" of public and private. 'Private' implied seclusion and withdrawal from the world, and was ascribed especially to women's place after the market and industrial revolutions. 'Public' evoked images of power, authority, law and justice, and was usually ascribed to the world of male leadership at least through the early decades of the twentieth century. (14) Because these divisions relied so heavily on cultural changes associated with economic modernization, the intensity of the boundaries between public and private in local settings has assumed prima facie power as a mark of modernity. Thus one reason historians and sociologists described small towns as sites of the traditional was because this private-public dichotomy often broke down in the small-town world. Private associations met in public spaces to determine municipal policy. County commissioners canvassed residents at informal gatherings before making publicly consensual political decisions. Yet no matter how artificial the boundaries between public and private appear when applied to the world of Lyon county, they do have significance. People themselves labelled spaces as public or private, and different activities were held in spaces depending on the meaning given to them.
Because small towns do blur the boundaries between public and private which urban society manages to maintain, historians of small-town life have been tempted to ascribe to rural communities the private and female attributes bound up within the private-public analytic axis. In discussing the literature of small towns published in the 1920s, Richard Lingeman quoted Page Smith's Look Homeward, Angel. Like so many novelists of the 1920s, Smith had left a small town for the big city: looking back, he described the history of small towns as one in which women subdued the town, "making it into a larger mother, the place where trust and love and understanding could always be found, making the town one of America's most persistent and critical symbols--the town as mother, comforter, source of love." (15)
One way out of the impasse created by the private-public dichotomy's inapplicability to twentieth-century small-town life is to consider the realm of the social. Karen Hansen defines the social realm as one which mediates the private-public axis, "linking households to neighbors and individuals to institutions." Among the activities which Hansen includes in the social sphere are "visiting, gossiping, churchgoing, attending lectures, joining political movements . . . and shopping." (16) Hansen relied on the concept of a "social sphere" because it enabled her to discuss women's activities such as visiting in broader terms of historical meaning. The concept also has power, however, in relation to theoretical ideas of the public sphere and of the relationship of public activities to political life.
Historians of community life in Puritan New England have noted that tradition as a concept derives meaning from its relationship to modernism. Darrett Rutman thus notes that the use of the word tradition "merely invites questions: traditional with reference to what variables? to what degree?" Rutman defines the challenge facing community historians to be that of identifying change within the apparently unchanging. He concludes that historians could best achieve this goal by focusing not on town inhabitants' attitudes but instead on the broad social processes to which the communities themselves testify: demographic change, internal and comparative economic status and resource allocation, and the embeddedness of "any particular place at any particular time . . . in the larger society." Here Rutman speaks of channels, not only economic but political and social, the vertical dimension of local societies that created "mutualities and obligations unrelated to place." Historical development in small towns for Rutman, then, moves first toward resource scarcity, then toward mobility, internal complexity, and "finally toward integration into the larger society." (17) Yet it is always a process of integration, never fully achieved.
Rutman also defined local communities as intellectually small, limited by the space allocated to them and dependent on the metropolis for cultural change and elaboration. He borrowed explicitly from the anthropological ideas of Robert Redfield, who defined such culturally dependent communities as "part-societies" or "part-cultures." Sonya Salamon, a rural anthropologist studying the Midwest, implicitly rejected this description of midwestern farming communities. Salamon focused instead on ethnically heterogeneous settlements there, settlements whose varied cultures not only determined people's actions but also constrained their options and inhibited people from alternate ways of doing, thinking, and feeling. (18) Geographers, in discussing the historical role of small towns, have relied on central-place theory, which located small-town identity in their collecting and distributing activities for the surrounding agricultural areas. According to geographers, post-1945 economic change has led to the demise of this small-town function, symbolized by the death of Main Street. (19) Whether this evaluation is correct or not, central-place theory enlarges the portrait of small towns as nodes along networks created by markets, a portrait that undermines any straight-forward ascription of traditional or modern traits to small-town life.
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