COMMUNITYfive assistants, addressed the effects on Muncie of
certain events during the period between 1925
and 1935, some of which were economic boom
times, a thirty-seven percent population increase,
and the emergence of the Great Depression. The
Lynds’ fundamental questions in the later study
addressed the persistence of the social fabric and
culture of the community in the face of the ‘‘hard
times’’ and other aspects of social change, the
stability of community values concerning self-reli-
ance and faith in the future when confronted by
structurally-induced poverty and dependence,
whether the Depression promoted a sense of com-
munity or undermined community solidarity by
introducing new social cleavages, and the out-
comes of latent conflicts observed in the mid-
1920s (Lynd and Lynd 1937, p. 4).
The conclusion reached by the Lynds was that
the years of depression did little to diminish or
otherwise change the essentially bourgeois value
structure and way of life in Middletown, and that
in almost all fundamental respects the community
culture of Middletown remained much as it did a
tumultuous decade earlier: ‘‘In the main, a Rip
Van Winkle, fallen asleep in 1925 while addressing
Rotary or the Central Labor Union, could have
awakened in 1935 and gone right on with his
interrupted address to the same people with much
the same ideas’’ (Lynd and Lynd 1937, p. 490).
Although this remark seems to reflect some amount
of disappointment on the Lynds’ part that Middle-
town’s bourgeois value system and class structure
remained so unchanged in the face of widespread
and unprecedented destitution, the Lynds still
remained convinced that the Middletown family
was in jeopardy, as evidenced by (among other
things) an ever-widening generation gap. The
Lynds’ apprehensions concerning the survival of
the American family were (and are) in keeping
with the popular belief concerning the decline of
the American family as its socialization functions
are assumed by other formal social institutions
external to the family.
The Middletown III study undertaken from
1976 to 1978 by Theodore Caplow, Howard M.
Bahr, and Bruce A. Chadwick, attempted to close-
ly replicate the methodology of the Lynds. Howev-
er, their findings were at odds with the more
pessimistic predictions of the Lynds. In contrast to
the Lynds’ foreboding in 1935 and popular soci-
ology since that time, Caplow and his associates
contend that Middletown’s families of the 1970s
have ‘‘increased family solidarity, a smaller genera-
tion gap, closer marital communication, more re-
ligion, and less mobility’’ (Caplow et al. 1982, p.
323). The conclusions derived from the third Mid-
dletown studies also reject similar assumptions
concerning consistent linear trends in equaliza-
tion, secularization, bureaucratization, and deper-
sonalization consistent with the relentless Gemeinschaft
to Gesellschaft theme (Bahr, Caplow, and Chadwick
1983).Although many of the Lynds’ predictions con-
cerning the social transformation of Middletown
failed to pan out as history unfolded, their work
and remarkable powers of observation remain
unparalleled in many respects. Of equal impor-
tance, the early Middletown studies helped to
inspire such other works as Street Corner Society and
the Yankee City studies, and they remain the
standard by which all other community studies
are judged.The largest scale community study undertak-
en remains W. Lloyd Warner’s Yankee City, pub-
lished in a five volume series from 1941 through
1959 (W. Lloyd Warner and Paul S. Lund, The
Social Life of a Modern Community 1941; W. Lloyd
Warner and Paul S. Lund, The Status System of a
Modern Community 1942; W. Lloyd Warner and
Leo Srole, The Social Systems of American Ethnic
Groups 1945; W. Lloyd Warner and J. O. Low, The
Social System of the Modern Factory 1947; and W.
Lloyd Warner The Living and the Dead 1959). The
Yankee City project was undertaken by Warner
and his associates in Newburyport, Massachusetts
during the late 1930s. Warner, an anthropologist,
attempted to obtain a complete ethnographic ac-
count of a ‘‘representative’’ American small com-
munity with a population range from 10,000 to
20,000. To accomplish this task, Warner’s staff
(numbering in the thirties) conducted aerial sur-
veys of Newburyport and its surrounding commu-
nities, gathered some 17,000 ‘‘social personality’’
cards on every member of the community, gath-
ered data on the professed and de facto reading
preferences of its citizens, and even subjected
plots of local plays to content analysis (Thernstrom
1964).Warner’s conception of Yankee City was that
of a stable, rather closed community with a social
structure being transformed in very negative ways