Abstract
Robert Wuthnow’s purpose in Small-Town America is to describe contemporary life in American small towns from the perspective of the residents themselves. A major part of this portrayal is an examination of what community means to people and how size of place affects that meaning. The book is based on in-depth qualitative interviews conducted from 1996 to 2011 with 680 small town residents in 300 towns across 43 states. Interviewees were selected using a purposive quota sampling design to ensure input from a broad cross-section of population. Additional interviews were conducted with 150 people who lived in bigger towns and cities. Wuthnow also visited more than 100 towns to observe town life and engage residents informally. Where appropriate, findings from the U.S. Census and other sources of quantitative data are incorporated to provide historical, economic, and demographic context for Wuthnow’s examination of life in small towns.
Small-Town America is written to appeal to an educated public. Major findings are illustrated with vignettes or stories. Background information about the individuals whose comments and stories are provided allows the reader to become acquainted with them as people. The quotes and stories are integrated seamlessly with findings from other studies and quantitative sources. Wuthnow’s respect for his interviewees and small-town residents in general is evident. The combination of stories with statistics, the abstract with the concrete, and an engaging writing style makes Wuthnow’s book enjoyable reading.
A major contribution of the book is Wuthnow’s nuanced conceptualization of the sense of community. Through his account, we can see the tension small town residents face between conforming to community norms and their highly held values of individuality and self-reliance. Residents, especially those in the upper and upper-middle classes, are expected to conform to the prevailing norms by providing leadership, donating money, and volunteering for community betterment causes. The fact of small size and low population density has important consequences for community life. Wuthnow labels this the “frog pond phenomenon” and shows how it magnifies the influence of community norms on individual behavior, explains the likelihood that people from different classes and backgrounds will interact with, or at least acknowledge, each other, and increases the necessity of resolving disagreements.
Aside from the elaboration of sense of community and the frog pond phenomenon, Wuthnow’s description of small-town life provides few surprises. In fact, the portrayal is almost archetypal. People who live in small towns like knowing their neighbors and other residents and living close to relatives, although they note that the ever-present tendency to gossip and the pressure to conform are disadvantages. Townspeople describe themselves as self-reliant, but look out for each other. They prefer a slow-paced, stable, safe, changeless place where people are “more authentic.” Residents are willing to give up bigger salaries, big-city amenities, and educational and occupational opportunities for the sense of community they believe small towns furnish. They despise big government and Washington, think small-town life leads to fewer divorces, are extremely pro-life, and believe that government handouts create a sense of entitlement among “welfare trash” and “riff raff.”
In the introduction to the book, Wuthnow argues that stereotypical beliefs about small towns, which, as it turns out, are very similar to his conclusions, must be interrogated. In his view, this has not happened in the past because the topic has largely been ignored by scholars since the 1950s. I disagree. The topic may not have received the space it deserves in introductory sociology textbooks and the flagship journals, but a substantial number of scholars have continued to research, publish, and theorize about the topic. Several journals are dedicated to publishing this literature. Unfortunately, Wuthnow’s dismissive view of contemporary community scholarship results in conclusions uninformed by this rather large body of literature.
Most authors in this literature do not present the kind of generalizations that appear in Wuthnow’s book. They do not conclude that “townspeople” believe or desire something without elaborating contingencies and dimensions, limitations, opposing views, and inconsistencies. Wuthnow may have rejected this approach in an attempt to make the book interesting and accessible to the public, but it may be related to his critique of early community studies. He claims that community scholars have too often in the past been elitist and disrespectful toward their subjects. In his view, they did not accept people’s accounts of life in small towns as authentic representations of reality and instead treated residents as suffering from false consciousness. However, it is not disrespectful to search for and report disconfirming cases, identify inconsistencies between and within interviewees’ accounts, or report how typical or common certain beliefs, values, or opinions are (e.g., exactly how frequent were pro-life or anti-Washington sentiments among his interviewees?).
Two important aspects of small-town life covered in the book illustrate the consequences of unfamiliarity with the extant research and failure to interrogate conclusions. In the chapter devoted to class structure, Wuthnow identifies four classes: gentry, service class, wageworkers, and pensioners. This leaves the impression that there is no lower class and no poverty in small towns, although Wuthnow acknowledges that some pensioners are poor. This is astonishing, given that the rate of poverty in rural counties is higher than in other counties. It is also astonishing because many comments from small-town residents in the book’s other chapters refer to the poor in their midst; for example, “We’ve got welfare trash out here just like they do in the cities” (p. 298).
A second main conclusion that should have been interrogated is residents’ affection for the changelessness of their small towns. Small towns are hardly changeless. The existing literature and my personal experience with small-town residents indicate that residents are well aware of the changes impacting their community. Many small towns have experienced tremendous economic booms or busts and/or slow-motion population loss, and some have experienced major disruptions due to the influx of immigrant workers hired by food processing industries. To be fair, Wuthnow does document the population decline experienced by most rural small towns, especially those in the prairie states. He briefly explains how it relates to the economic situation, available amenities, and age structure of these small towns. A whole chapter is devoted to the challenges of maintaining churches in areas with too few, mostly aging, people. It is in this chapter that immigration and economic disruptions are presented. But of course, these phenomena have ramifications for small-town life that go well beyond their impact on rural congregations. They have changed the class structure, causing greater poverty or greater prosperity and usually greater inequality. Infrastructure—downtowns, schools, libraries, and public services—is affected. The question is not whether change is occurring in small towns. It is. The question that deserved far more attention in this book is how those interviewees who perceive small-town life as changeless reconcile that belief with the momentous changes their towns have experienced.
Small-Town America’s value lies in Wuthnow’s elegant writing and the attention it directs toward small towns. Elaborating therelationship between town size and sense of community is a major contribution to the literature. The danger, however, is that the archetypal picture presented by Wuthnow leaves out important aspects of small-town life that residents deal with regularly. I described two (poverty and the cognitive dissonance that results from loving the “changelessness” of small towns in the context of great changes), but there are others. Without acknowledging these features, our understanding of contemporary small-town life and the challenges faced by small-town residents who wish to maintain their quality of life is incomplete.