In any event, the original study was extremely valuable and interesting, the result being a snapshot in time of Muncie. Following is the forward (which was written by Clark Wissler of the American Museum of Natural History ca. 1929) from the book simply titled "Middletown," by the Robert and Helen Lynd which was published by Harcourt, Brace and Company; after the Forward I have included the authors Introduction which explains their intent and how Muncie was picked.

Forward

"On every hand we hear the admonition, 'The study of society must be made objective.' When one asks what is meant by this, he is referred to the natural and the biological sciences. But while the average man has little difficulty in comprehending what is meant by objective in the study of electricity, bees, etc., he finds himself at a loss to visualize the objects of study in a social inquiry. There is nothing strange in this, because the professionals in social science are still far from confident that they have their hands upon the social reality. True, many attempts have been made to find the basic factors in society, but these factors have been sought, for the most part, in the laboratories of biology and psychology, which is not unlike groping behind the scenes and digging under the stage, disregarding the comedies, tragedies, and dramas in plain sight. On the other hand, experience with social phenomena is bringing us nearer and nearer to a realization that we must deal directly with life itself, that the realities of social science are what people do. Seemingly in full realization of this, the authors of this book have patiently observed an American community and sketched out for us, in the large, the whole round of its activities. No one has ever subjected an American community o such scrutiny; probably few would regard it as worth while. Rather have we been taught to set store by studies of the individual on one hand, and on the other, on the gathering of intimate statistics as to wages, living conditions, etc., for groups in our national population at large, as coal miners, teamsters, working girls, etc. The first of these seems to have been ordered upon the theory that maladjustments of individuals might be dealt with effectively if one knew a true sample of personal histories, and, in the main, studies of this kind have justified their making. The second seems to rest on the assumption that occupational groups present collective problems which can be dealt with on a national level, the maladjustments in this case arising in the failure of these groups to articulate properly with other groups. Here again insight has been achieved by statistical and analytical studies of wide scope. There remains, however, the obvious condition that the masses of individuals concerned live and function in communities, and that the picture will not be complete until these communities also are made objects of study. Whatever else a social phenomenon is, it is a community affair. The communities that collectively are American are also objective, they are realities, and if, as we are told, we can never know society until it is subjected to objective methods, then here is one place to begin.

"So this volume needs no defense; it is put forth for what it is, a pioneer attempt to deal with a sample American community after the manner of social anthropology. To most people, anthropology is a mass of curious information about savages and this is so far true, in the most of its observations are on the less civilized. What is not realized is that anthropology deals with the communities of mankind, takes the community, or tribe, as the biological and social unit, and in its studies seeks to arrive at a perspective of society by comparing and contrasting these communities; and whatever may be the deficiencies of anthropology, it achieves a large measure of objectivity, because anthropologists are by the nature of the case 'outsiders.' To study ourselves as through the eye of an outsider is the basic difficulty in social science, and may be insurmountable, but the authors of this volume have made a serious attempt, by approaching an American community as an anthropologist does a primitive tribe. It is in this that the contribution lies, an experiment not only in method, but in a new field, the social anthropology of contemporary life.

"Finally, irrespective of the interest of social science, this volume is a contribution to history, not the usual kind of history, but the kind that is coming more and more into demand, a cross-section of the activities of a community today as projected from the background of yesterday, and the authors are to be commenced for their foresight in revealing the Middletown of 1890 as a genesis of the Middletown of today, not as its contrast. Every reader of these pages will realize more clearly than before the changes each decade has brought and the imperfect way in which our communities, of which this is a sample, have met the new conditions under which they must function, and incomplete though this record is, its perusal should enlighten the conscientious citizen and serve as a suggestion as to what information is needed by those who attempt to direct the affairs of an American Town"

Introduction

Chapter 1 NATURE OF THE INVESTIGATION

The aim of the field investigation record in the following pages was to study synchronously the interwoven trends that are the life of a small American city. A typical city, strictly speaking, does not exist, but the city studied was selected as having many features common to a wide group of communities. Neither field work nor report has attempted to prove any thesis; the aim has been, rather, to record observed phenomena, thereby raising questions and suggesting possible fresh points of departure in the study of group behavior.

The stubborn resistance which "social problem" offer may be related in part to the common habit of piecemeal attack upon them. Students of human behavior are recognizing increasingly, however, that "the different aspects of civilization interlock and intertwine, presenting - in a word - a continuum." The present investigation, accordingly, set out to approach the live of the people in the city selected as a unit complex of interwoven trends of behavior.

Two major difficulties present themselves at the outset of such a total-situation study of a contemporary civilization; first, the danger, never wholly avoidable, of not being completely objective in viewing a culture in which one's life is imbedded, of falling into the old error of starting out, despite oneself, with emotionally weighted presuppositions and consequently failing ever to get outside the field one set out so bravely to objectify and study; and, second, granted that no one phase of living can be adequately understood without a study of all the rest, how is one to set about the investigation of anything as multifarious as the gross-total thing that is Schenectady, Akron, Dallas, or Keokuk?

A clew to the securing both of the maximum objectivity and of some kind of orderly procedure in such a maze may be found in the approach of the cultural anthropologist. There are, after all, despite infinite variations in detail, not so many major kinds of things that people do. Whether in an Arunta village in Central Australia or in our own seemingly intricate institutional life of corporations, dividends, coming-out parties, prayer meetings, freshmen, and Congress, human behavior appears to consist in variations upon a few major lines of activity: getting the material necessities for food, clothing, shelter; mating; initiating the young into the group habits of thought and behavior; and so on. This study, accordingly, proceeds on the assumption that all the things people do in this American city may be viewed as falling under one or another of the following six main-trunk activities:

Getting a living. Making a home. Training the young. Using leisure in various forms of play, art, and son on. Engaging in religious practices. Engaging in community activities.

This particular grouping of activities is used with no idea of its exclusive merit but simply as a methodological expedient. By viewing the institutional life of this city as simply the form which human behavior under this particular set of conditions has come to assume, it is hoped that the study has been lifted on to an impersonal plane that will save it from the otherwise inevitable charge at certain points of seeming to deal in personalities or to criticize the local life. For, after all, having one's accustomed ways scrutinized by an outsider may be disconcerting at best. Like Aunt Polly in Donald Ogden Stewart's Aunt Polly's Story of Mankind, many of us are prone to view the process of evolution a the ascent from the nasty amoeba to Uncle Frederick triumphantly standing at the top of the long and tortuous course in a Prince Albert with one gloved hand resting upon the First National Bank and the other upon the Presbyterian church. To many of us who might be quite willing to discuss dispassionately the quaintly patterned ways of behaving that make up the customs of uncivilized peoples, it is distinctly distasteful to turn with equal candor to the life of which we are a local ornament. Yet nothing can be more enlightening than to gain precisely that degree of objectivity and perspective with which we view "savage" peoples. Even though such a venture in contemporary anthropology may be somewhat hazy and distorted, the very trial may yield a degree of detachment indispensable for clearer vision.

It is a commonplace to say that an outstanding characteristic of the ways of living of any people at any given time is that they are in process of change, the rate and direction of change depending upon proximity to strong centers of cultural diffusion, the appearance of new inventions, migration, and other factors which alter the process. We are coming to realize, moreover, that we today are probably living in one of the eras of greatest rapidity of change in the history of human institutions. New tools and techniques are being developed with stupendous celerity, while in the wake of these technical developments increasingly frequent and strong culture waves sweep over us from without, drenching us with the material and non-material habits of other centers. In the face of such a situation it would be a serious defect to omit this developmental aspect from a study of contemporary life.

The further device has, therefore, been adopted in this investigation, wherever the data available permitted, of using as a groundwork for the observed behavior of today the reconstructed and is so far as possible equally objectively observed behavior of 1890. The year 1890 was selected at the base-line against which to project the culture of today because of greater availability of data from that year onward and because not until the end of 1886 was natural gas truck in the city under study and the boom begun which was to transform the placid county-seat during the nineties into a manufacturing city. This narrow strip of thirty-five years comprehends for hundreds of American communities the industrial revolution that has descended upon villages and towns, metamorphosing them into a thing of Rotary Clubs, central trade councils, and Chamber of Commerce contests for "gibber and better" cities.

Had time and available funds permitted, it would obviously have been desirable to plot more points in observed trends between 1890 and the present. But the procedure followed enables us to view the city of today against the background of the city of a generation ago out of which it has grown and by which it is conditioned, to see the present situation as the most recent point in a moving trend.

To sum up then: the following pages aim to present a dynamic, functional study of the contemporary life of this specific American community in the light of the trends of changing behavior observable in it during the last thirty-five years.

So comprehensive an approach necessarily involves the use of data of widely varying degrees of overtness and statistical adequacy. Some types of behavior in the city studied lie open to observation over the whole period since 1890; in other cased only slight wisps of evidence are obtainable. Much fold talk, for instance - the rattle of conversation that goes on around a luncheon table, on street corners, or while waiting for a basket ball game to commence - is here presented, not because it offers scientifically valid evidence, but because it affords indispensable insights into the moods and habits of thought of the city. In the attempt to combine these various types of data into a total-situation picture, omissions and faults in proportion will appear. But two saving facts must be borne in mind; no effort is being made to prove any thesis with the data presented, and every effort is made throughout to warn where the ice is thin.

Since the field work aimed at the integration of diverse regions of behavior rather than at the discovery of new material in a narrowly isolated field, it will be easy to say of much of the specific data presented, "We knew that already." Underlying the study, however, is the assumption that by the presentation of these phenomena, familiar though some of them may be, in their inter-relatedness in a specific situation, fresh light may be thrown upon old problems and so give rise to further investigation.

Chapter 2 THE CITY SELECTED

The city will be called Middletown. A community as small as thirty-odd thousand affords at best about as much privacy as Irvin Cobb's celebrated goldfish enjoyed, and it has not seemed desirable to increase this high visibility in the discussion of local conditions by singling out the city by its actual name.

There were no ulterior motives in the selection of Middletown. It was not consulted about the project, and no organization or person in the city contributed anything to the cost of the investigation. Two main considerations guided the selection of a location for the study: (1) that the city be as representative as possible of contemporary American life, and (2) that it be at the same time compact and homogeneous enough to be manageable in such a total-situation study.

In line with the first of thee considerations the following characteristics were considered desirable: (1) A temperate climate. (2) A sufficiently rapid rate of growth to insure the presence of a plentiful assortment of the growing pains accompanying contemporary social change. (3) An industrial culture with modern high-speed machine production. (4) The absence of a dominance of the city's industry by a single plant, i.e., not a one-industry town. (5) A substantial local artistic life to balance its industrial activity; also a large self-contained artistic life, e.g., not that of a college town in which the college imports the community's music and lectures. (The absence of any outstanding peculiarities or acute local problems which would mark it of from the mid-channel sort of American community. After further consideration, a seventh qualification was added: the city should, if possible, be in that common-denominator of America, the Middle West. Tow streams of colonists met in this middle region of the United States: "The Yankees from New England and New York came by way of the Erie Canal into northern Ohio. . . . The southern stream of colonists having passed through the Cumberland Gap into Kentucky, went down the Ohio River." With the first of these came also a foreign-born stock, largely from Great Britain, Ireland and Germany.

In order to secure a certain amount of compactness and homogeneity, the following characteristics were sought; (1) a city of the 25.000-50,000 group. This meant selection from among a possible 143 cities, according to the 1920 Census. A city of this size, it was felt, would be large enough to have put on long trousers and to take itself seriously, and yet small enough to be studied from many aspects as a unit. (2) A city as nearly self-contained as possible in this era of rapid and pervasive inter-communication, not a satellite city. (3) A small Negro and foreign-born population. In a difficult study of this sort it seemed a distinct advantage to deal with a homogeneous native-born population, even though such a population is unusual in an American industrial city. Thus, instead of being forced to handle two major variables, racial change and cultural change, the field staff was enabled to concentrate upon cultural change. The study thus became one of the interplay of a relative constant native American stock and its changing environment. As such it may possibly afford a base-line group against which the process of social change in the type of community that includes different racial backgrounds may be studied by future workers.

Middletown, selected in the light of these considerations from a number of cities visited, is in the East-North-Central group of states that includes Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan and Wisconsin. The mean annual temperature is 58.8 Degrees F. The highest recorded temperature is 102 Degrees F. in July and the lowest 124 Degrees F. in January, but such extremes are ordinarily of short duration, and weather below zero is extremely rare. The city was in 1885 an agricultural county-seat of some 6,000 persons; by 1890 the population has passed 11,000, and in 1920 it had topped 35,000. This growth has accompanied its evolution into an aggressive industrial city. There is no single controlling industrial plant; three plants on June 20, 1923, had between 1,000 and 2,000 on the payroll, and eight others from 300 to 1,000; glass, metal, and automobile industries predominate. The census of 1890 showed slightly less than 5 per cent. of the city's population to be foreign-born and less that 4 per cent. Negroes, as against approximately 2 per cent. foreign-born in 1920 and nearly 6 per cent. Negroes; over 81 per cent. of the population in 1890 and nearly 85 per cent. in 1820 was native white of native parentage. In the main this study confines itself to the white population and more particularly to the native whites, who compose 92 per cent. of the total population.

The nearest big city, a city under 350,000, is sixty miles away, nearly a two-hour trip by train, with no through hard surface road for motoring at the time the study was made. It is a long half-day train trip to a large city. Since the eighties Middletown has been known all over the state as "a good music town." Its civic and women's clubs are strong, and practically none of the local artistic life was in 1924 in any way traceable to the, until then, weak normal school on the outskirts.

The very middle-of-the-road quality about Middletown would have made it unsuitable for a different kind of investigation. Had this study sought simply to observe the institution of the home under extreme urban conditions, the recreational life of industrial workers, or any one of dozens of other special "social problems," a far more spectacular city than Middletown might readily have been found. But although it was its characteristic rather than its exceptional features which led to the selection of Middletown, no claim is made that it is a "typical" city, and the findings of this study can, naturally, only with caution be applied to other cities or to American life in general.

Chapter 3 THE HISTORICAL SETTING

Two major experiences in Middletown antedate 1890, the date taken as the horizon of this study: the pioneer life of the earlier part of the century, and the gas boom of the end of the [eighteen] eighties which ushered in Middletown's industrial revolution. Both are within the memory of men who still walk the streets of the city.

The first permanent settlement in this county occurred in 1820, and county government was granted in 1827. The memory of one of the oldest citizens, a leading local physician throughout the nineties, reaches back to the eighteen-forties. Within the lifetime of this one man local transportation has changed from virtually the "hoof and sail" methods in use in the time of Homer; grain has ceased to be cut in the state by thrusting the sickle into the ripened grain as in the days of Ruth and threshing done by trampling out by horses on the threshing floor or by flail; getting a living and making a home have ceased to be conducted under one roof by the majority of the American people; education has ceased to be a luxury accessible only to the few; in his own field of medicine the X-ray, anesthetics, asepsis, and other developments have tended to make the healing art a science; electricity, the telephone, telegraph and radio have appeared; and the theory of evolution has shaken the theological cosmogony that had reigned for centuries.

This local physician whose lifetime so nearly spans that of Middletown, the tenth of a family of eleven, was named, with the characteristic political fervor of the time, General William Harrison K--- [Kemper?]. The log farmhouse of his father was ceiled inside without plaster, the walls bare save for three prized pictures of Washington, Jackson, and Clay. All meals were cooked before the great kitchen fireplace, corn pones and "cracklings" and bread being baked in the glare of a large curved reflector set before the open fire. AT night the rooms were lighted by the open fire and by tallow dips; there was great excitement later when the first candle mold appeared in the neighborhood. Standard time was unknown; few owned watches, and sun time was good enough during the day, while early and late candle lighting served to distinguish the periods at night. When the fire went out on the family hearth the boy ran to a neighbor's to bring home fire between two boards; it was not until later that the first box of little sticks tipped with sulphor startled the neighborhood.

The homely wisdom of pioneer life prescribed that children be passed through a hole in the trunk of a hollow tree to cure "short growth"; hogs must be slaughtered at certain times of the moon or the bacon would shrink; babies must be weaned at certain times of the zodiac; the "madstone," "a small bone form the heart of a dear," was a valuable antidote for hydrophobia or snake-bite; certain persons "blew the fire out of burn," arrested hemorrhage or cured erysipelas by uttering mysterious charms; a pan of water under the bed was used to check night sweats; bleeding was the sovereign remedy for fits, loss of consciousness, fever, and many other ills; and "in eruptive fevers, especially measles, where the eruption was delayed, a tea made of sheep's dung, popularly known as 'nanny tea,' was a household remedy."

Social calls were unknown, but all-day visits were the rule, a family going to visit either by horseback, the children seated behind the grown-ups, or in chairs set in the springless farm wagon. Social intercourse performed a highly important service; there were no daily papers in the region, and much news traveled by word of mouth. Nobody came to the home around mealtime who was not urged to take his place at the table - preachers being particularly welcome. Men would talk together for hours on the Providential portent of the great Comet of 1843, or of the time then years before when the "stars fell." Men and women went miles and spent days in order to hear champions argue disputed political or religious points. People "got religion" and were "awakened to sin" at camp meetings under the vivid exhortation of baptizing preachers. The "Word" wove its influence closely about everyday acts.

Forty years later, in 1885, before gas wealth spouted from the earth, bring in their wake a helter-skelter industrial development, Middletown, a placid county-seat of some 6,000 souls, still retained some of the simplicity of this early pioneer life. "On the street . . . on fair days lawyers, doctors, the officials of the county courts, and the merchants walked about in their shirt sleeves. The house painter went along with his ladder on his shoulder. In the stillness there cold be heard the hammers of the carpenters building a new house for the son of a merchant who had married the daughter of a blacksmith." Men in their prime who had grown up under pioneer conditions now controlled the affairs of Middletown. They were occupied with such momentous matters as offering "$200 for the scalp or body of any person in the city caught setting fire to the property of another," or passing regulations in response to complaints about neighborhood cows running through the streets and destroying lawns, or with badly bungling the job of laying the first town sewer.

The thin edge of industry was beginning to appear, though few people thought of the place then as anything but an agricultural county-seat: a bagging plant employed from a hundred to a hundred and fifty people, making bags from the flax grown in the surrounding countryside; a clay tile yard employed some fifteen; a roller-skate "company" in an old barn up an alley, perhaps eighty; a feather-duster "factory," five or six; a small foundry, half a dozen; and a planing mill and two flour mills, a few more. It was till for Middletown the age of wood, and a new industry meant a hardwood skewer shop, a barrel-heading shop, or a small wooden pump works.

Such modest ventures in manufacturing as the community exhibited were the tentative responses of small local capital to the thing that was happening to the whole Middle West. The Federal Census reveals a steady movement westward of the center of manufacturing; in 1880 it was still in Pennsylvania, but by 1890 it had pushed on until it was eight and one-half miles west of Canton, Ohio. Dry-goods clerks were beginning to spend their evenings perfecting little models of washing-machines, mechanical hair-clippers, can-openers, various power driven devices. The proprietor of a small Middletown restaurant who led a town band in the evening and "was always neglecting business to tinker around at things" saw a crude cash-register in a saloon in a neighboring city while on a trip there with his band, conceived the idea of a self-adding register, and set to work in the hope of making his fortune. The annual total of patents registered in Washington, which had remained practically constant during the decade of the seventies, jumped in 1890 to roughly double the 1880 figure.

In the state in which Middletown is located, the number of wage-earners increased from 69,508 in 1880 to 110,590 in 1890, and by 1900 was to total 155,956. The capital invested in manufacturing plants in the state doubled between 1880 and 1890 and was almost to double again by 1900.

The quiet life of the town drowsing about its courthouse square with its wooden pump - and iron dippers, punctually renewed every Fourth of July - was beginning to stir to these outside influences. A small Business and Manufacturing Association was formed about 1886 for "the promotion of any and all undertakings calculated to advance the interests, improvements and general welfare of the city."

In 1876 a company boring for coal twelve miles north of the town had plugged up the hole and abandoned the project after boring 600 feet; all the "struck" was a foul odor and a roaring sound deep in the bowels of the earth, and rumor had it that they had invaded "his Satanic Majesty's domain." Nine years later, when natural gas was discovered at other points in the Middle West, the incident of the plugged-up hole north of town was recalled. In October, 1886, there was great local excitement over the plans "to bore for gas or oil or both." In November we read, "The persons employed to bore for oil have this morning 'struck' gas, and everybody is on the way to see for themselves." The roar of the escaping gas is said to have been audible for two miles and the flame when it was "lit up" could be seen in Middletown a dozen miles away.

The boom was on.

The laying of a pipe line to bring the gas into the county-seat began immediately, and new wells were sunk. By the following April a local well was producing 5,000,000 feet daily. New wells multiplied on every hand. In January, 1891, the local paper exclaimed, "We have a new gas well which really does eclipse all others in the [gas] belt. Daily output is nearly 15.000.000 feet, and they worked over thirty hours trying to anchor the flow." No wonder the little town went wild!

Meanwhile, form the spring of 1887 on through 1891 and 1892, the "boomers" were arriving:

"Four vestibule, one dining-room and one baggage special train from Buffalo with 134 of its capitalists came in last night to see for themselves what gas can do and are much pleased. . . . Taken in carriages to all the factories and sites. . . . Grand manufacturing exhibition at the Rink, and a beautiful display of four open street cars." "A trainload of 1,200 form Cincinnati." "Quite a number of New York City capitalists and newspaper men came in form the East last night; three and one-half pages of the --- Hotel register were covered with their signatures." "American Association for the Advancement of Science visits the City and witnesses the wonders of Natural gas; 300 scientists and men of affairs in the party."

Real estate was being turned over with dizzying rapidity. IN 1888 a man tried to buy an eight-acre chunk of farm land on the outskirts of town, shying at the price of $1,600, took only a sixty-day option. Before the sixty-day option expired the eight acres changed hands five times the final price being $3,200.

Nothing short of the sky seemed an adequate limit to the citizens of Middletown. A contemporary parody runs -

"Tell me not in mournful numbers That the town is full of gloom, For the man's a crank who slumbers In these bursting days of boom."

Optimists predicted a population of 50,000 in five years and even the pessimists allowed only ten years. The general sentiment was that the gas supply was inexhaustible. Some called it the "City of Eternal Gas." The introduction to the Middletown City Directory announced confidently, "Every forty acres will supply a gas well, and 576 wells can be drilled within . . . [the] corporate limits and suburbs." "The mathematical deduction would be," chanted a "boom book, " "that the continuance of this supply would be, at least, one hundred times as long as Pittsburgh, which would be 700 years." Great flambeaus burned recklessly day and night in the streets and at the wells. When the pipe lines were laid, consumers were charged by the fixture rather than by any system of exact measurement. It was cheaper to leave the gas on and to throw open doors and windows than to expend a match in relighting it.

With the boomers came new industries lured by free fuel and free building sites. The early Business and Manufacturing Association awakened to new life in February, 1887, as the "Board of Trade," and concerted efforts were made to "sell the town" to industrial capital. Glass came first. Next were the iron mills - a bridge company, a nail works. A diary for 1888-9 buzzes with rumors of the coming of these new plants:

"Report that another glass factory is coming immediately." "Work progressing on the pulp mill and rubber factory." "A nail works wants to come here from ---." "Considerable talk about a Palace Stock Car Factory." "A boot and shoe factory is coming; building commenced this afternoon."

By the summer of 1890 the local paper speaks of the thriving little "gasopolis" with pardonable pride:

"Two and one-half years ago when natural gas was first discovered in [Middletown] was a county-seat of 7,000 in habitants . . . It has grown since that time to a busy manufacturing city of 12,000. . . . Over forty factories have located here during that time. . . . There has been $1,500,000 invested in Middletown manufacturing enterprises employing 3,000 men. . . . Over thirty gas wells have been drilled in and around the city, every one of which is good. . . ."

The first boom of '87 and '88 was the spontaneous, unorganized rush to a new El Dorado. When the earlier boom was renewed in '91 it was engineered by the Eastern land syndicate and carried forward by the local boosters' association, the Citizens' Enterprise Company, organized in August, 1891. The last-named organization raised $200,000 fund to lure new industries with free sites and capital.

Several years later, as abruptly as it had come, the gas departed. By the turn of the century or shortly thereafter, natural gas for manufacturing purposes was virtually a thing of the past in Middletown. But the city had grown by then to 20,000, and, while industry after industry moved away, a substantial foundation had been laid for the industrial life of the city of today.

And yet it is easy, peering back at the little city of 1890 through the spectacles of the present, to see in the dust and clatter of its new industrialism a developed industrial culture that did not exist. Crop reports were still printed on the front page of the leading paper in 1890, and the paper carried a daily column of agricultural suggestions headed "Farm and Garden." Local retail stores were overgrown country stores swaggering under such names as "The Temple of Economy" and "The Beehive Bazaar." The young Goliath, Industry, was still a neighborly sort of fellow. The agricultural predominance in the county-seat was gone, but the diffusion of the new industrial type of culture was as yet largely superficial - only skin-deep.

This, then, suggest the background of the city which is the subject of this field investigation.