America's Small Town/Big City Dialectic

Abstract

The big city and small town have been stereotyped in the American experience as being at opposite ends of an imagined social gradient—the former more a place of cold impersonality in social relations and the latter more a place of warm personalized community. Assumptions about urban-based “mass society” largely blinded Americans through the twentieth century to the existence of, and importance of, locality-based community in big cities. Early in the century, most urban Americans emigrated from rural and small town circumstances, bringing to the nation's cities strong rural and small town proclivities at neighboring. Both central city working-class neighborhoods and affluent suburbs mirrored the small town. The similarities, and not just the differences, between big city and small town life invite renewed analysis. This study argues for a fuller understanding of how small town idealizations impacted metropolitan America.