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What America Is Losing as Its Small Towns Struggle
https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2017/10/small-town-economies-culture/543138/
To erode small-town culture is to erode the culture of the nation.
Seventy-five years ago, The Atlantic published an essay by a man named Arthur Morgan. The essay, “The Community—The Seed Bed of Society,” appeared in the February 1942 issue, and was later expanded into a book called The Small Community: Foundation of Democratic Life. Both the essay and the book were arguments on behalf of communities, especially small towns, which Morgan believed had been abandoned by modernity to become “an orphan in an unfriendly world … despised, neglected, exploited, and robbed.”
The social good of such places, Morgan insisted, was being “dissolved, diluted, and submerged by modern technology, commercialism, mass production, propaganda, and centralized government.” While many big-city residents might not worry about the fate of small towns, Morgan believed they should because the “controlling factors of civilization are not art, business, science, government. These are its fruits. The roots of civilization are elemental traits—good will, neighborliness, fair play, courage, tolerance, open-minded inquiry, patience.” These traits are best transmitted from one generation to the next in small communities, he argued, from where they are then spread throughout entire societies. To erode small-town culture was to erode the culture of the nation.
At a time when many small towns are in crisis—facing economic decline, drug addiction, despair—when economists and pundits recommend giving up on small towns, telling their populations to abandon their homes to find economic opportunity elsewhere, Morgan’s 75-year-old plea remains a trenchant warning. Some modern-day sociologists and historians, while not buying everything Morgan said and wrote about small towns, agree with his main point: Such places are vital threads in America’s fabric.
Even in his time, Morgan was sometimes accused of being a utopian dreamer, but he was also practically minded. He was a civil engineer who, after a peripatetic early life, came to care deeply about promoting community. He opened a business in Dayton, Ohio, where he had helped establish the Miami River Conservancy District to prevent flooding. Antioch College, located nearby in the village of Yellow Springs, appointed him to the board of trustees, and he became president of the school in 1920. There he created one of the first systems of “cooperative education,” a program in which students learned in traditional academic settings part-time, and worked in businesses and industries part-time.
To erode small-town culture is to erode the culture of the nation.
Seventy-five years ago, The Atlantic published an essay by a man named Arthur Morgan. The essay, “The Community—The Seed Bed of Society,” appeared in the February 1942 issue, and was later expanded into a book called The Small Community: Foundation of Democratic Life. Both the essay and the book were arguments on behalf of communities, especially small towns, which Morgan believed had been abandoned by modernity to become “an orphan in an unfriendly world … despised, neglected, exploited, and robbed.”
The social good of such places, Morgan insisted, was being “dissolved, diluted, and submerged by modern technology, commercialism, mass production, propaganda, and centralized government.” While many big-city residents might not worry about the fate of small towns, Morgan believed they should because the “controlling factors of civilization are not art, business, science, government. These are its fruits. The roots of civilization are elemental traits—good will, neighborliness, fair play, courage, tolerance, open-minded inquiry, patience.” These traits are best transmitted from one generation to the next in small communities, he argued, from where they are then spread throughout entire societies. To erode small-town culture was to erode the culture of the nation.
At a time when many small towns are in crisis—facing economic decline, drug addiction, despair—when economists and pundits recommend giving up on small towns, telling their populations to abandon their homes to find economic opportunity elsewhere, Morgan’s 75-year-old plea remains a trenchant warning. Some modern-day sociologists and historians, while not buying everything Morgan said and wrote about small towns, agree with his main point: Such places are vital threads in America’s fabric.
Even in his time, Morgan was sometimes accused of being a utopian dreamer, but he was also practically minded. He was a civil engineer who, after a peripatetic early life, came to care deeply about promoting community. He opened a business in Dayton, Ohio, where he had helped establish the Miami River Conservancy District to prevent flooding. Antioch College, located nearby in the village of Yellow Springs, appointed him to the board of trustees, and he became president of the school in 1920. There he created one of the first systems of “cooperative education,” a program in which students learned in traditional academic settings part-time, and worked in businesses and industries part-time.
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